Communicating with people who are dreaming: a story of lucid dreamers

Welcome to this edition's?Sleepletter?where we offer you easy-to-read insights from the latest research papers from the field of?sleep neurobiology?and clinical?sleep medicine. We hope you enjoy the content!

Communicating with dreamers

Ah, dreams. A memorizing reality of two tails: amazing experiences where our world is for a brief moment perfect and horrifying ones that make us afraid to go to sleep the next night. In fact, dreaming is such an incredible state that studies have shown that people who are paraplegic since birth walked, ran and even danced in their dreams. Furthermore, most dreams of participants who are deaf do not contain sensory limitations and many of them speak and can understand spoken language. People blind from birth also report mental images in their dreams, which are likely representations of the objects they touch in real life. Moreover, people with either congenital physical disability or amputated limbs still dream of themselves as physically unharmed (1 ). Incredible what our brain can produce, right? But why do we even dream and how are these imaginative worlds created? The answer, for now, is simple: we don’t really know. Why? Because most dream reports are fragmented, and humans have a limited capacity to remember them for long. Also, we can’t really know what and why the person is dreaming in a particular moment either. But what if we could communicate with dreamers in real time and thus study dreams while they are happening? You may have heard of lucid dreamers - people who are actually aware they are dreaming and can somewhat influence the dream, whereas all other people have no real control over them. Lucid dreamers may give us an important insight into the world of dreams, so they could be a great subpopulation for studying dreams.?

An international team of researchers led by Northwestern University studied 36 lucid dreamers with the aim of seeing if they could establish communication with people while they were dreaming (2 ). All dreamers underwent polysomnographic recordings, a standard procedure to assess, among other parameters, stages of sleep (non-REM, REM) via electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings. Here, electrodes that measure brain activity are placed on the person’s skull to see what stage of sleep they are in. Along with measuring muscle tone, eye movement, breathing and other parameters, sleep stages can be determined accurately. Out of all sleep stages, REM (rapid eye movement) stage is most associated with dreams, although people do dream in other stages too. So the researchers knew when the people in the study were sleeping, but not when they were dreaming. Therefore, lucid dreamers were told to move their eyes left and right in a pre-arranged motion to let the researchers know that they started dreaming (cool, right?). In 57 recorded sessions with REM sleep, lucid dreamers signalled 15 times (26.3%) that they were dreaming. Then, the researchers wanted to see if they can establish two-way communication with them. They did that in several ways: asking verbal questions about simple math problems (e.g. what is 2+3) or about the participant’s life (“Do you study biology?”), but they also flashed lights or played beeping tones at sleepers to ask a certain question. The lucid dreamers responded to the questions by twitching certain face muscles or moving their eyes in a pre-determined motion. Out of 158 trials, there were 29 correct responses (18.4%) to questions, 5 incorrect (3.2%), 18 ambiguous (17.7%) and 60.8% of times when no answers were given. On the other hand, when sleepers were asked questions without them signalling that they were dreaming, only two correct responses were obtained, thus showing that the correct answers in the pervious tasks were not just random. After the participants woke up, some were able to remember that they were asked a specific question while dreaming, indicating that they could form actual memories while asleep. These surprising results of interactive dreaming open up new possibilities of insight into this enigmatic dimension of sleep and could also help us understand why we dream at all.?

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About the author

Alen Juginovi??is a medical doctor and?postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, USA studying the effect of poor sleep quality on health. He is also organizing international award-winning projects such as Nobel Laureate conferences, international congresses, concerts and other, as well as participating in many events as a speaker. Feel free to contact him via LinkedIn for any inquiries.