The veil between the world of dreams and reality may be more tenuous than we thought. In a new study launched on Thursday, scientists from four countries claim to have demonstrated that it is possible to communicate with people while they are lucid dreaming. At least sometimes, dreamers were supposed to be able to answer yes or no questions and simple math problems through facial and eye movements; later, some remembered hearing the questions during the dream.
Cognitive neuroscientist and study author Ken Paller and colleagues at Northwestern University in Chicago have been studying the connection between sleep and memory for years. It is common to think that sleep is crucial for the robust storage of memories created throughout the day. But little is known about this process and how dreams can play a role in it.
“We are investigating the dream to learn more about why dreams happen and how they can be useful for mental function during wakefulness,” Paller told Gizmodo via email. “As in our other work, we hypothesized that sleep cognition events may be beneficial for memory function.”
One of the reasons why it is difficult to understand the dream is that most of us have difficulty remembering dreams completely when we wake up, let alone telling others. But Paller and his team have experimented with trying to communicate with people who have been sleeping for a long time. Your previous searches demonstrated that people can be influenced by sounds from the outside world while sleeping. Another survey of lucid dreamers – people who claim to have control over their dreams – suggested that they can signal to outside observers through eye movements during the dream (in 2018, a study suggested that these eye movements can be used to tell when a person has entered a state of lucid dreaming).
Many people are familiar with unilateral communication with a sleeping person, as sleepwalking and speech during sleep are common phenomena. But Paller’s team reasoned that it should be possible to have two-way communication between dreamers and awake observers and that dreamers should be able to remember those conversations. They also theorized that this communication could be induced and replicated under the right conditions in the laboratory, which would be great for future sleep research. It turns out that they were not the only scientists to have this idea. At least three other research groups in France, Germany and the Netherlands were pursuing the same objective.
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“The research groups did studies independently and then we found out that we had done similar studies in different countries. So we decided to publish all of our results together – cooperatively, rather than competitively, ”said Paller.
The study was Published Thursday in Atual Biology, while the work will also be featured in a PBS documentary that will air on Friday (the segment can already be seen on YouTube on here)
In all, the study involved 36 volunteers. Some were self-proclaimed specialists in lucid dreaming, especially a 20-year-old Frenchman with narcolepsy who made it possible for them to achieve REM sleep (the sleep stage where dreams are most common) in the first minute of a 20 minute nap. Other participants had no previous experience with lucid dreaming, but Paller’s team tried to train all participants to start a lucid dream when they heard a certain sound played in their sleep. Some teams used spoken words or tones to communicate; others had lights blinking or lightly touching the platters. The volunteers were also monitored using typical sleep measurements, such as EEG, which records brain activity.
Over 57 sleep sessions, participants were able to signal that they entered a lucid dream through eye movement 26% of the time. In these successful sessions, scientists were able to get at least one correct answer to a question through a dreamer’s eye movements or facial contortions almost half the time. Overall, of the 158 times they tried to communicate with a lucid dreamer during these sessions, they got a correct response rate of 18% (the most common answer, about 60%, was no answer).
When volunteers were asked about their experiences, some reported being able to remember the pre-dream instructions they received and tried to carry them out. Some also reported hearing the questions they asked during the dream, although not always in the same way. Some reported that they heard words that clearly seemed to come from outside their current reality, while others said that it looked as if they were listening via radio or other form of communication within the dream. But there were still times when people could not remember clearly what had happened or when the questions they said they had received in the dream did not correspond to the questions they had actually received.
As tempting as the study’s findings may be, they are based on a small sample size, so any conclusions should be viewed with some additional caution. But they demonstrate that it is at least possible to have two-way communication with dreamers, Paller said. And the fact that different groups of scientists, in different parts of the world and using slightly different methods, were able to record this event indicates that it is not just an isolated or poorly identified phenomenon, he added.
The team coined the “interactive dream” phenomenon. And now that they feel they have shown that it is possible, they plan to continue to improve people’s ability to enter that state.
“At the moment, we are exploring possibilities to conduct experiments in people’s own homes, rather than in the sleep laboratory. There may be some advantages to doing this, as people will not be influenced by the unusual environment of a sleep laboratory or the monitoring technology we use, ”said Paller. One way they’re exploring for future research is to use a smartphone app that teaches people how to have lucid dreams and how to improve on it – an app that Now available, for any curious person out there.
The hope is that this technique will allow researchers like Paller to come a little closer to unraveling the mysteries of our dream lives and how they can affect our waking hours. Over time, this research can even be applied proactively to improve people’s lives, improving their sleep habits and dreams.
“Applications can be developed for problem solving, practicing improved skills, spiritual development, nightmare therapy and strategies for other psychological benefits,” said Paller.