Scientists have identified a new phenomenon they describe as an “interactive dream,” where people who experience deep sleep and lucid dreams can follow instructions, answer simple questions about yes or no, and even solve basic math problems.
In addition to adding a new level of understanding to what happens to our brains when we dream, the new study could teach us how to train our dreams, to help us achieve a specific goal, for example, or treat a problem. of particular mental health.
There are many things about sleep psychology that remain a mystery, including the rapid eye movement (REM) stage where dreams usually occur. Being able to get answers from people sleeping in real time, rather than relying on reports later, can be very helpful.
“We’ve found that individuals who sleep REM can interact with an experimenter and communicate in real time,” says psychologist Ken Paller of Northwestern University. “We also demonstrated that dreamers are able to understand questions, engage in working memory operations, and produce answers.
“Most people could predict that this wouldn’t be possible, that people would wake up when asked a question or stop answering, and they certainly wouldn’t understand a question without misinterpreting it.”
The researchers worked with 36 individuals in experiments in four different laboratories. One volunteer had narcolepsy and frequently experienced lucid dreams, while the others varied in terms of their experience with lucid dreams.
During the deeper stages of sleep, as monitored with electroencephalogram (EEG) instruments, the scientists interacted with study participants through spoken audio, flashing lights, and physical touch: the bedrooms were asked. to answer simple mathematical questions, to count light flashes or physical touches, and to answer basic questions about yes or no (such as “can you speak Spanish?”).
Responses were given through pre-agreed eye movements or facial muscle movements. In 57 sleep sessions, at least one correct response to a consultation was observed in 47 percent of the sessions in which the participant confirmed lucid sleep.
Confirmation of lucid dream states was done blindly, with the need to agree on various answers by witnesses.
A summary of the experiments. (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 convincingly attests to the reality of this two-way communication phenomenon,” says neuroscientist Karen Konkoly of Northwestern University.
“That way, we see that different media can be used to communicate.”
The people involved in the study used to wake up after a successful response to get them to report their dreams. In some cases, external entrances were remembered as outside or superimposed on sleep; in others, they came through something within the dream (like a radio).
In the published study, researchers compare trying to communicate with lucid dreams with trying to get in touch with an astronaut in space, and the immediacy of the responses makes this new approach so exciting.
Research may be useful in the future study of dreams, memory, and the importance of sleep to fix memories in place. It can also be helpful in treating sleep disorders and may even give us a way to train what we see in our dreams.
“These repeated observations of interactive sleep, documented by four independent laboratory groups, demonstrate that the phenomenological and cognitive characteristics of sleep can be questioned in real time,” the researchers write in their work.
“This relatively unexplored communication channel may allow for various practical applications and a new strategy for the empirical exploration of dreams.”
The research has been published in Current biology.