ONLY IN YOUR WILDEST DREAMS
Even today, scientists don’t know why we dream. But now psychologists have found a way to communicate with lucid dreamers – people who can take control of their dreams – in the hope that they might help us explore what goes on with our brains at night
By unlocking the secrets of lucid dreamers’ minds, we could find out more about what happens to our brains while we sleep.
Billionaires are jetting themselves into space and quantum computing lies around the corner. Yet one of the most familiar and everyday aspects of human nature remains frustratingly tricky for scientists to study – dreaming.
Theories abound, but the truth is we don’t really know much about why or how we dream. A major hurdle for scientists has been the fact that when people are dreaming, they’re largely closed off from the world, at least that’s been the assumption for a long while. So researchers have resorted to asking people, upon awakening, what their mind was doing while they were sleeping, but that’s a sketchy and unreliable approach.
“Memories of dreams can be missing some parts of dreams and can be distorted and incorrect, so if that’s all we have to go on, then building a solid science of dreaming will be difficult,” says Dr Ken Paller, a psychologist and dream researcher at Northwestern University. What would change the whole dream research landscape would be if there were some way to communicate and interact with someone while they were dreaming. It sounds far-fetched, like something out of the Christopher Nolan movie Inception, but in a significant breakthrough, that’s exactly what an international team of researchers, led by Paller and Karen Konkoly also at Northwestern University, managed to achieve. The work, which was published in the journal Current Biology earlier this year, “opens up the opportunities for scientific explorations of dreaming considerably,” says Paller. “We now have more ways to learn about dreaming.”
Theirs is one of several new projects that have begun to exploit the research opportunities afforded by ‘lucid dreaming’ – a relatively rare state in which the dreamer, during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, becomes consciously aware that they are dreaming. This is a new frontier of research, but lucid dreams have been known about for millennia. Aristotle described the state like this: “...often when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream”.
Not only does this wave of new work involving lucid dreams open up exciting opportunities to research the nature and function of dreaming, but it also raises intriguing practical possibilities for clinical interventions and self-development, including boosting learning and creativity.
CHOOSE YOUR DREAM
If you’ve ever been in a dream and known you were dreaming, then you’ve experienced the lucid dreaming state. It’s estimated that about half of us fall in this category, with around 20 per cent
of us experiencing the phenomenon on a monthly basis and 1 per cent having several such experiences each week. Sometimes, people in a lucid state can even begin to deliberately choose what happens in their dream, as if they were a director of their own movie. This degree of conscious control is important for scientists because it raises the possibility that the dreamer might be able to choose to communicate with the outside world.
In terms of what’s happening in the brain during lucid dreaming, research is at a relatively early stage. There have been several studies that measured people’s brainwaves via an EEG during lucid dreaming, but it has only been captured in a modern high-resolution brain scanner a handful of times. “In short, we still don’t know what the localised brain activity changes are associated with lucid dreaming,” says Dr Benjamin Baird at the Wisconsin Institute for Sleep and Consciousness, University of WisconsinMadison, who has studied the neural correlates of lucid dreaming. “There is some preliminary neuroimaging data which suggests a role of the frontoparietal network [a network of connected regions spanning the front and rear of the brain that’s involved in attention and problem solving],” he adds, though he notes more research is needed to confirm this.
One thing Baird says does seem clear is that lucid dreaming seems to occur during periods of more intense brain activation during REM sleep.
“REM sleep has peaks and valleys of activity when the brain is more or less activated as it goes along,” he explains. “We become lucid at the mountain peaks of brain activation, when we are in the mental set of trying to recognise that we are dreaming – or sometimes by chance if something triggers us to consider whether we are dreaming.”
ENTER DREAMWORLD
If you’ve never had a lucid dream, you might be wondering what it feels like. One person who is highly familiar with them is Dave Green, the English comedian turned lucid-dream artist, who first started having lucid dreams as a child. “Having a lucid dream is like being embodied in your imagination,” he says. “You are navigating an environment that is entirely created by your mind, yet it looks and feels like waking life.”
Unable to perform stand-up comedy during the pandemic, he rediscovered lucid dreaming and started using the experience to conjure artworks that he then creates upon waking. “Besides creating artworks, my favourite thing to do in a lucid dream is flying. It is never anything less than ecstatic,” he says. (If you are keen to experience this for yourself, the good news is that lucid dreaming is to an extent a trainable skill – see the opposite page for some basic techniques.)
For their breakthrough lucid dreaming study, Konkoly and Paller, along with their colleagues at other laboratories in France, Germany and the Netherlands, exploited the residual conscious awareness enjoyed by lucid dreamers. To do this, they recruited several experienced lucid dreamers, as well as some lucid dreaming newbies, who they trained to experience lucid dreams.
Next, they used a procedure developed by fellow dream scientist Dr Michelle Carr and her colleagues, in which beeps and flashing lights are repeatedly paired during wakefulness with an instruction to become lucid – that is to become mindful of one’s thoughts and sensations, and to consider whether they reflect being awake or in a dream. Konkoly and Paller’s team then used these same sounds or lights while their participants were sleeping (as confirmed objectively by a measure
“YOU ARE NAVIGATING AN ENVIRONMENT CREATED BY YOUR MIND, YET IT LOOKS AND FEELS LIKE WAKING LIFE”
of their brainwaves) to prompt them to become lucid while dreaming. Crucially, if the study participants entered a lucid dream state, they were trained to indicate this by making sweeping horizontal movements with their eyes.
At this point, the researchers had used dreamers’ eye movements to establish communication from within their dreams to the outside world. That’s been done many times before, notably by the American psychophysiologist Dr Stephen LaBerge in the early 1980s as a way to objectively verify the lucid dreaming phenomenon – that is, that lucid dreamers really are aware and able to respond. But Konkoly and Paller and their international collaborators then went further, to create a situation of truly “interactive dreaming” as they called it. After participants indicated they were in a lucid dream, the scientists gave them basic maths questions, such as ‘eight minus six’, which the participants answered successfully using eye movements, according to a code agreed earlier (for instance, in this case, the answer ‘two’ was communicated by a left-right, leftright eye movement).