You Can Talk to Lucid Dreamers During REM Sleep, Say Researchers, Even Ask Questions and Get Good Answers

In Current Biology, Dreams take us to a different reality, a hallucinatory world that feels as real as any waking experience. These often-bizarre episodes are emblematic of human sleep but have yet to be adequately explained. Retrospective dream reports are subject to distortion and forgetting, presenting a fundamental challenge for neuroscientific studies of dreaming.

Credit: Current Biology Cell Press

Researchers showed that individuals who are asleep and in the midst of a lucid dream (aware of the fact that they are currently dreaming) can perceive questions from an experimenter and provide answers using electrophysiological signals.  Scientists implemented their procedures for two-way communication during polysomnographically verified rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep in 36 individuals. Some had minimal prior experience with lucid dreaming, others were frequent lucid dreamers, and one was a patient with narcolepsy who had frequent lucid dreams.

According to the study “During REM sleep, these individuals exhibited various capabilities, including performing veridical perceptual analysis of novel information, maintaining information in working memory, computing simple answers, and expressing volitional replies. Their responses included distinctive eye movements and selective facial muscle contractions, constituting correctly answered questions on 29 occasions across 6 of the individuals tested.”

Set up of the study 

These repeated observations of interactive dreaming, documented by four independent laboratory groups, demonstrate that phenomenological and cognitive characteristics of dreaming can be interrogated in real time. This relatively unexplored communication channel can enable a variety of practical applications and a new strategy for the empirical exploration of dreams.

Instead of waiting for dreamers to tell researchers  about a dream after it has ended, when they have transitioned to the waking state, they sought to obtain evidence showing that it is possible to interview them about their dreams at the time they are experiencing them. The experimental goal is akin to finding a way to talk with an astronaut who is on another world, but in this case the world is entirely fabricated on the basis of memories stored in the brain. Demonstrating the viability of this “interactive dreaming”—when experimenter and dreamer communicate with each other in real time—would be a large step forward to promote future progress in dream research, write Karen R. Konkoly et al. 

In typical dreams, people judge their experience with a high degree of acceptance and a lack of critical evaluation; they fail to realize that their experience is merely a dream. On the other hand, a “lucid dream” differs in that the dreamer gains the elusive insight of being in a dream.
 

 Lucid dreams occur predominantly during REM sleep and can be accompanied by eye-movement signals used to indicate that dreamers recognize that they are dreaming or to transmit other information such as time-stamping dream events. However, lucid dreaming is a notoriously rare phenomenon and lucid dreams can seldom be summoned at will, which has made it difficult for researchers to capture them in the lab in a reliable manner.

Researchers  report multiple demonstrations of successful two-way communication during lucid dreams achieved by four independent scientific teams in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the US

Contacts and sources:
Current Biology 

Cell Press

Publication: Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep.
Konkoly et al. Current Biology, 2021 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.01.026