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Scientists have identified a new phenomenon which they describe as “interactive dreaming,” where people who experience deep sleep and lucid dreams are able to follow instructions, answer simple yes or no questions, and even solve basic math problems.
As well as adding a whole new level of understanding to what happens to our brains when we dream, the new study could potentially teach us how to shape our dreams – to help us achieve a particular goal, for example, or to treat one. particular mental health problem.
There’s a lot about sleep psychology that remains a mystery, including the rapid eye movement (REM) stage where dreams typically occur. Being able to get responses from sleepers in real time, rather than relying on reports afterwards, could be extremely helpful.
“We found that people in REM sleep can interact with an experimenter and communicate in real time,” says psychologist Ken Paller of Northwestern University. “We have also shown that dreamers are able to understand questions, engage in working memory operations, and generate answers.
“Most people could predict that it wouldn’t be possible – that people would wake up when asked a question or not answer, and certainly wouldn’t understand a question without misinterpreting it.”
The researchers worked with 36 people in experiments in four different labs. One volunteer suffered from narcolepsy and frequently lucid dreaming, while the others varied in terms of lucid dreaming experience.
During the deepest stages of sleep, monitored by electroencephalogram (EEG) instruments, scientists interacted with study participants through spoken audio, flashing lights, and physical touch: the sleepers were asked to answer simple mathematical questions, to count flashes of light or physical contacts. , and to answer basic yes or no questions (like “can you speak Spanish?”).
The answers were given by eye movements or facial muscle movements agreed in advance. Out of 57 sleep sessions, at least one correct response to a query was observed in 47% of the sessions where lucid dreaming was confirmed by the participant.
Confirmation of lucid dreaming states was done blindly, with dormant responses requiring approval by multiple witnesses.
A summary of experiences. (Konkoly et al., Current Biology 2021)
“We put the results together because we felt that the combination of results from four different labs using different approaches most convincingly testifies to the reality of this two-way communication phenomenon,” says neuroscientist Karen Konkoly of the University. Northwestern.
“In this way, we see that different means can be used to communicate.”
People involved in the study were usually woken up after a successful response to make them realize their dreams. In some cases, the external entrances were recalled as being on the outside or superimposed on the dream; in others, they went through something inside the dream (like a radio).
In the published study, researchers compare trying to communicate with lucid dreamers to trying to make contact with an astronaut in space, and it is the immediacy of the responses that makes this new approach so exciting.
The research could be useful in the future study of dreams, memory, and the importance of sleep in fixing memories. It might also prove to be helpful in treating sleep disorders, and later it might even give us a way to shape what we see in our dreams.
“These repeated observations of the interactive dream, documented by four groups of independent laboratories, demonstrate that the phenomenological and cognitive characteristics of the dream can be questioned in real time,” the researchers write in their article.
“This relatively unexplored channel of communication may allow a variety of practical applications and a new strategy for the empirical exploration of dreams.”
The research was published in Current biology.
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