This article today jogged a dream I
had about psychics, remote viewers
abd dreams becoming a target...so a
warning of possible exploitation and
new dark entities arriving in the
dreamtime...be warned!!!
https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-
human-body/communicate-with-lucid-
dreamers/?
utm_medium=10todayuk.20211008&utm_so
urce=email&utm_content=article&utm_c
ampaign=10todayuk
....What would change the whole
dream research landscape would be if
there were some way to communicate
and interact with someone while they
were dreaming. It sounds far-
fetched, like something out of the
Christopher Nolan movie Inception,
but in a significant breakthrough,
that’s exactly what an international
team of researchers, led by Paller
and Karen Konkoly also at
Northwestern University, managed to
achieve.
The work, which was published in the
journal Current Biology in April
2021, “opens up the opportunities
for scientific explorations of
dreaming considerably,” says Paller.
“We now have more ways to learn
about dreaming.”
Theirs is one of several new
projects that have begun to exploit
the research opportunities afforded
by ‘lucid dreaming’ – a relatively
rare state in which the dreamer,
during rapid eye movement (REM)
sleep, becomes consciously aware
that they are dreaming. This is a
new frontier of research, but lucid
dreams have been known about for
millennia. Aristotle described the
state like this: “…often when one is
asleep, there is something in
consciousness which declares that
what then presents itself is but a
dream”.
Not only does this wave of new work
involving lucid dreams open up
exciting opportunities to research
the nature and function of dreaming,
but it also raises intriguing
practical possibilities for clinical
interventions and self-development,
including boosting learning and
creativity.
Read more about dreaming:
What is lucid dreaming?
If you’ve ever been in a dream and
known you were dreaming, then you’ve
experienced the lucid dreaming
state. It’s estimated that about
half of us fall in this category,
with around 20 per cent of us
experiencing the phenomenon on a
monthly basis and 1 per cent having
several such experiences each week.
Sometimes, people in a lucid state
can even begin to deliberately
choose what happens in their dream,
as if they were a director of their
own movie. This degree of conscious
control is important for scientists
because it raises the possibility
that the dreamer might be able to
choose to communicate with the
outside world.
In terms of what’s happening in the
brain during lucid dreaming,
research is at a relatively early
stage. There have been several
studies that measured people’s
brainwaves via an EEG during lucid
dreaming, but it has only been
captured in a modern high-resolution
brain scanner a handful of times.
“In short, we still don’t know what
the localised brain activity changes
are associated with lucid dreaming,”
says Dr Benjamin Baird at the
Wisconsin Institute for Sleep and
Consciousness, University of
Wisconsin-Madison, who has studied
the neural correlates of lucid
dreaming.
“There is some preliminary
neuroimaging data which suggests a
role of the frontoparietal network
[a network of connected regions
spanning the front and rear of the
brain that’s involved in attention
and problem solving],” he adds,
though he notes more research is
needed to confirm this.
One thing Baird says does seem clear
is that lucid dreaming seems to
occur during periods of more intense
brain activation during REM sleep.
“REM sleep has peaks and valleys of
activity when the brain is more or
less activated as it goes along,” he
explains. “We become lucid at the
mountain peaks of brain activation,
when we are in the mental set of
trying to recognise that we are
dreaming – or sometimes by chance if
something triggers us to consider
whether we are dreaming.”
Communicating with lucid dreamers
If you’ve never had a lucid dream,
you might be wondering what it feels
like. One person who is highly
familiar with them is Dave Green,
the English comedian turned lucid-
dream artist, who first started
having lucid dreams as a child.
“Having a lucid dream is like being
embodied in your imagination,” he
says. “You are navigating an
environment that is entirely created
by your mind, yet it looks and feels
like waking life.”
Unable to perform stand-up comedy
during the pandemic, he rediscovered
lucid dreaming and started using the
experience to conjure artworks that
he then creates upon waking.
“Besides creating artworks, my
favourite thing to do in a lucid
dream is flying. It is never
anything less than ecstatic,” he
says. (If you are keen to experience
this for yourself, the good news is
that lucid dreaming is to an extent
a trainable skill.)
For their breakthrough lucid
dreaming study, Konkoly and Paller,
along with their colleagues at other
laboratories in France, Germany and
the Netherlands, exploited the
residual conscious awareness enjoyed
by lucid dreamers. To do this, they
recruited several experienced lucid
dreamers, as well as some lucid
dreaming newbies, who they trained
to experience lucid dreams.
Next, they used a procedure
developed by fellow dream scientist
Dr Michelle Carr and her colleagues,
in which beeps and flashing lights
are repeatedly paired during
wakefulness with an instruction to
become lucid – that is to become
mindful of one’s thoughts and
sensations, and to consider whether
they reflect being awake or in a
dream.
Comedian Dave Green creates artworks
while lucid dreaming, then draws
them upon waking © Dave Green
Comedian Dave Green creates artworks
while lucid dreaming, then draws
them upon waking © Dave Green
Konkoly and Paller’s team then used
these same sounds or lights while
their participants were sleeping (as
confirmed objectively by a measure
of their brainwaves) to prompt them
to become lucid while dreaming.
Crucially, if the study participants
entered a lucid dream state, they
were trained to indicate this by
making sweeping horizontal movements
with their eyes.
At this point, the researchers had
used dreamers’ eye movements to
establish communication from within
their dreams to the outside world.
That’s been done many times before,
notably by the American
psychophysiologist Dr Stephen
LaBerge in the early 1980s as a way
to objectively verify the lucid
dreaming phenomenon – that is, that
lucid dreamers really are aware and
able to respond.
But Konkoly and Paller and their
international collaborators then
went further, to create a situation
of truly “interactive dreaming” as
they called it. After participants
indicated they were in a lucid
dream, the scientists gave them
basic maths questions, such as
‘eight minus six’, which the
participants answered successfully
using eye movements, according to a
code agreed earlier (for instance,
in this case, the answer ‘two’ was
communicated by a left-right, left-
right eye movement).
By now the researchers had broken
exciting new ground, successfully
achieving two-way communication with
participants while they were
dreaming. They had succeeded at
their goal, which as they put it in
their paper, was “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.”
Read more about sleep:
The benefits of lucid dreaming
The study by Konkoly, Paller and
their colleagues was focused on
establishing a two-way communication
between a dreamer and the outside
world. It was a proof-of-concept
study that promises to pave the way
for many new and exciting projects,
both to uncover more about the
nature of the dreaming brain and for
practical interventions to enhance
learning and creativity, for
instance. However, even without the
capability of two-way communication,
other researchers have already
tested the potential of lucid
dreaming in various ways.
For example, there is such as thing
as lucid dreaming therapy, which
involves teaching lucid dreaming
techniques to sufferers of
nightmares, so that they can choose
to wake up from a nightmare or even
change the narrative so that its
content is less distressing.
Other researchers have explored the
possibility that lucid dreaming
could be used to practise motor
skills. Dr Daniel Erlacher at the
University of Heidelberg and Dr
Michael Schredl at the Central
Institute of Mental Health in
Mannheim, assigned a group of lucid
dreamers to repeatedly toss a coin
into a cup in their dreams. Compared
with their baseline real-life
performance, the participants’
accuracy the next day was improved
by a greater amount than a control
group who didn’t do any further
coin-tossing practice in real life
or dreamland.
Illustration of a sleeping brain
filled with dream-like elements ©
Sam Falconer
© Sam Falconer
It might also be possible to exploit
lucid dreams to aid creative problem
solving. For instance, Dr Tadas
Stumbrys and Dr Michael Daniels at
Liverpool John Moores University
found that lucid dreamers were able
to call on the help of dream
characters to help them come up with
more creative metaphors.
Crucially, the two-way interaction
between dreamer and outside world
established by Konkoly and Paller
and others could build upon and
expand these various ways to exploit
the lucid dreaming state.
For instance, their model of
interactive dreaming suggests that
sensory cues could be associated
with desired dream content in
advance and then played during the
lucid dream state, making it more
likely that the lucid dream will
involve features that could help aid
creativity or contribute to
learning.
Adverts while you sleep
That said, the path ahead is not
likely to be all plain sailing.
“[The technique for communicating
with lucid dreamers] does not work
every time we try,” says Paller. “We
are in the process of improving our
methods, so I don’t know how
reliable they could be eventually.”
Indeed, Paller cautions against
getting too carried away: “I have an
open mind about the potential for
this method to be useful in the
future,” he says.
Another elephant in the room
(probably a flying pink one, if
you’re dreaming)is the ethical
issues raised by this entire line of
work. If researchers can reach into
our dreams and affect what we dream
about, then that presents the
possibility that other people can
too, such as advertisers who might
reach us in our sleep via smart
speakers or other devices. Indeed,
that’s already begun happening:
early in 2021, American beer company
Coors experimented with deliberately
inducing dreams of their product
among volunteers.
These developments recently prompted
a large group of dream scientists,
led by Dr Robert Stickgold at
Harvard Medical School and Dr
Antonio Zadra at Université de
Montréal, to write an op-ed warning
of the ethical dangers of
advertisers exploiting the advances
in their field. “Brain science
helped design several addictive
technologies, from cell phones to
social media, that now shape much of
our waking lives; we do not want to
see the same happen to our sleep,”
they wrote.
Paller and Konkoly were actually
among the co-signatories of the
letter, and they too are mindful of
the important ethical implications
of their work. “Messages delivered
during sleep to an unwilling
individual could be regarded as a
form of inappropriate advertising
and made illegal,” says Paller.
As Zadra elaborates, “While the
technologies themselves are neutral
and hold promise in fostering
creativity and treating
psychological disorders, their use
to alter and motivate purchasing
behaviour through dream hacking is
worrisome.”
Just as science has taken us to
uncharted territories in space and
on Earth, raising new ethical
questions along the way, the same is
now true for a new frontier as
researchers accelerate their
exploration of our sleeping minds.
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