Science: Study of lucid dreaming (audio)

James Doubek (NPR, 2/27/21 via scpr.org); Pat Macpherson, CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Dreams are "messages from your own mind," but what are lucid dreams? (Psychology Today)

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Scientists talked to dreamers, who answered from inside their dreams

A bed, perchance to dream (VA State Parks)

Researchers say two-way communication is possible with people who are asleep and lucid dreaming.

Specifically, people who are lucid dreaming — that is, dreaming while being aware they're dreaming — can communicate from inside their dreams.

In separate experiments, scientists in the USA, France, Germany, and the Netherlands asked people simple questions while they slept.

Sleepers were able to respond by moving their eyes or twitching their faces in certain ways to indicate their answers.

"Since the '80s, we've known that lucid dreamers can communicate out of dreams by using these signals," says researcher Karen Konkoly, a doctoral (Ph.D.) student at Northwestern University who is the first author on the study published this month in Current Biology.

"But we were wondering, can we also communicate in? Can we ask people questions that they could actually hear in their dreams that we could kind of have a more meaningful conversation?"

The Buddha's eyes of wisdom see far (Nepal).

These scientists were studying REM (rapid-eye-movement) sleep, which is the stage of sleep where people dream most vividly.

In REM sleep "every muscle in your body is completely paralyzed, except you can twitch and you can move your eyes," Konkoly tells Scott Simon on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday.

"So if you become lucid [self-aware] in a dream and you want to communicate, then when people are dreaming, they just look left-right, left-right, really dramatically. And then we know that they're communicating out."

Lucid dreaming is uncommon. So to study it, scientists recruited people who had experience with it and also trained them to try to make lucid dreaming more likely.

What about waking dreams on DMT or LSD?

Before they went to sleep, the participants were also trained how to communicate their answers. Special sensors measured people's eye movements or experts would judge their facial movements.

For example, a typical question would be to ask, "What is 8 minus 6?"

A 19-year-old American man was able to respond by moving his eyes left-right, left-right — two times — to signal "2." Researchers asked the question again, and he moved his eyes the same way two times again.

• There were 158 trials among 36 participants
• About 18% of the time lucid dreamers were able to give correct answers.
• In another 18% it was unclear if participants responded.
• They were wrong 3% of the time.
• Most often (61%) participants didn't respond at all.

For the people dreaming lucidly, they didn't always interpret the questions they were hearing as a simple question from researchers:

"Sometimes stimuli were perceived as coming from outside the dream. But other times the stimuli emanated from elements of the dream, contextualized in a way that made sense in relation to ongoing dream content," the researchers write.

In one case one participant "heard the questions transposed over their dream as though it [were] God talking to them," Konkoly says.

The researchers write that their findings present "new opportunities for gaining real-time information about dreaming, and for modifying the course of a dream" and "could usher in a new era of investigations into sleep and into the enigmatic cognitive dimensions of sleep."

Konkoly says there's the possibility of one day doing a sort of "dream therapy" for talking down people experiencing LUCID NIGHTMARES.

• [Though if lucid, they would seem not to need help, as they would be aware that they were only dreaming.]

Trump for dictator? Ahh, no! Wake me up!

And if more reliable communication methods can be worked out, it could help people with creative activities and ideas. "People often use lucid dreaming or dreaming for a kind of artistic, creative inspiration," Konkoly says.

"But in that dream state, your resources thus far are only the ones that you have in the dream." So with the help of an awake person, Konkoly says it could be possible to "combine those logical advantages of wake with the creative advantages of dreams and maybe have some more applications." More + AUDIO

• Samantha Balaban and Ed McNulty produced and edited the audio interview (visit npr.org).