(Arjun Walia) An international team of researchers was able to achieve real-time dialogues with people in the midst of lucid dreams, a phenomenon that is called “interactive dreaming,” according to a study published recently in Current Biology.
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by Arjun Walia, March 14th, 2021
Can dreams be used to help us with personal development? To predict possible future events and/or to gain important insight about something we feel is important in our lives?
What Happened: A recent study published in Current Biology titled “Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep” has discovered that individuals who are asleep and experiencing a lucid dream, which is a dream where the individual knows that they are in the midst of a dream, can “perceive questions from an experimenter and provide answers using electrophysiological signals.” These answers are provided while they are dreaming.
The study points out:
We implemented our 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. 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. 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.
Lucid dreamers were able to follow instructions to compute mathematical operations, answer yes-or-no questions, or discriminate stimuli in the visual, tactile, and auditory modalities. They were able to respond using volitional control of gaze direction or of different facial muscles. There were three different participant categories.
Pretty remarkable isn’t it? The fact that lucid dreamers were able to communicate with the researchers, who weren’t dreaming, is quite mind altering.
Researchers used spoken words, beeping tones, flashing lights and other tactical stimuli like touching the dreamers hand and “tapping” to communicate with the dreamers. The “messages” and questions that the dreamers were “receiving” were answered and acknowledged by the dreamers in the form of eye movements, facial contractions etc.
The dreamers used in the study provide some descriptions after they woke up of what they experienced in real time when the researchers began the stimuli process
I was at a party with friends. Your voice was coming from the outside, just like a narrator of a movie…I decided to answer ‘no’ (with facial muscle contractions).
When the lights started flickering. I recognized this as a (Morse-coded) signal from the outside and counted **** *** ***** and reported the answer ‘4’ with eye signals.
During the finger tapping, I was fighting against goblins. I remember being surprised that I was able to do many things at the same time as the task.
After reading this it reminded me of the movie Inception, when the dreamers were “triggered” by outside stimuli to begin the “waking up” process, which would manifest as some sort of experience in their dream that would trigger their awakening. The only difference this time is that the stimuli wasn’t done for the purposes of waking the dreamers, but to simply communicate with them while they were dreaming.
As mentioned in the study, one of the examples came from a 35-year-old German participant. This one was an experienced lucid dreamer, and while he was dreaming and presented with a visual stimuli by the researchers of alternating colors and a Morse-coded math problem which was 4 minus 0, the participant produced the correct answer using eye movements. The participant described giving his answer after awakening from the dream. “In his description of the dream, he maintained that he heard the message “4 plus 0″ and answered accordingly.” This example comes from the second quote above.
A 20-year-old French participant with narcolepsy and remarkable lucid-dreaming abilities was also used. Because of his narcolepsy, he reached REM sleep quickly, about 1 min after the beginning of a 20-min daytime nap, and he signaled lucidity 5 min later. The researchers verbally asked him yes/no questions and he answered correctly using facial muscle contractions (zygomatic muscle for yes, corrugator muscle for no). In a separate analysis of facial contractions during lucid dreaming, the researchers never observed a response in the absence of stimulation. This example comes from the first quote above, where he experienced this in his dream as an actual voice asking him a yes or a no question.
“There are studies of lucid dreamers communicating out of dreams, and also remembering to do tasks. But there’s a fairly limited amount of research on the stimuli going into lucid dreams….One thing that surprised us is that you could just say a sentence to somebody, and they could understand it just as it actually is….It’s amazing to sit in the lab and ask a bunch of questions, and then somebody might actually answer one. It’s such an immediately rewarding type of experiment to do. You don’t have to wait to analyze your data or anything like that. You can see it right there while they’re still sleeping.” – Karen Konkoly, a PhD student at Northwestern University and first author of the paper. (source)
About The Author
I joined the CE team in 2010 shortly after finishing university and have been grateful for the fact that I have been able to do this ever since :) There are many things happening on the planet that don’t resonate with me, and I wanted to do what I could to play a role in creating change. It’s been great making changes in my own life and creating awareness and I look forward to more projects that move beyond awareness and into action and implementation
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