Scientists communicate with lucid dreamers in breakthrough study

The breakthrough study

This week, a team of international researchers at Current Biology were able to achieve two-way communication with people in the midst of lucid dreams – a feat previously thought to be impossible.

36 participants were recruited in different laboratory settings across the US, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, in the hope that a significant sample would fall into a state of lucid dreaming and still demonstrate an ability to communicate with experts.

Verifying that people had entered REM sleep through monitoring electrode patterns next to the eyes, chin, and brainwaves through the scalp, experts were able to confirm several participants had entered an aware state of dreaming. These lucid dreamers then performed a left-right ocular pattern established before the experiment to demonstrate that they were cognisant.

A simple set of questions were then put to each participant to better understand how functional a lucid dreamer can be whilst asleep.

Roughly 18% of the trials resulted in a ‘clear and accurate’ communication from the dreamer, 17% produced indecipherable answers, 3% answered questions incorrectly, and 60% provoked no response at all. In a few really impressive instances, people were even able to perform adding and subtraction sums through eye signals, confirming their answers on multiple occasions.

If that wasn’t freaky enough, many of the participants were able to actually recall the interactions with researchers when awake, and a few reported that prompts sounded like a voiceover or narrator emanating from outside their dream space.

Why is this useful?

We’ve all had the experience of waking from a vivid dream only to feel its contents fade into fragments and then eventually nothing as the day unfolds.

Accurately reconstructing a dream once fully awake is incredibly difficult, and thus research into dream analysis is often plighted by questions of unreliability. This is in part due to the fact our brains don’t naturally intend to form new memories while asleep. That would be pretty darn boring 90% of the time, after all.

Through communicating live with lucid dreamers though, experts now have the potential to gain insight into better understanding how dreams work – and if they can potentially one day be manipulated.

https://twitter.com/_hodaxo/status/1362148272782143491

It may sound like something from Christopher Nolan’s Inception, but researchers from this experiment are suggesting that if we continue with this kind of study, we may eventually be able to adapt dreams with external cues to fit a person’s specific needs.

Whether someone is coping with emotional trauma and needs a revolutionary type of therapy, or even just wants to live out some type of fantasy (not like that), researchers believe we could now be on the right track to making it a reality.

Sounds good to me. I don’t know about you, but personally I’m sick of being chased around by cartoon beasts at 26 years of age.