What neurologists discovered during the experiment
At the beginning of Christopher Nolan's film Genesis (Inception), actor Leonardo DiCaprio enters other people's dreams to interact with them and steal secrets from their subconscious. Now it seems that something similar could happen. For the first time, researchers had "conversations" involving new questions and problems with mathematics with people during "Lucid Dreaming".
The findings from four labs and 36 participants suggest that people can receive and process complex information even during sleep.
"These data challenge basic definitions of sleep," says cognitive neurologist Benjamin Baird of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who studies sleep and dreams but is not part of the study. According to him, sleep is defined as a condition in which the brain is turned off and does not realize the outside world, but this understanding undergoes its metamorphosis lately.
The researchers first trained participants to recognize when they were dreaming, explaining how lucid dreaming works and demonstrating signs - sounds, lights or finger taps that they would present while dreamers slept. The idea is that these signs should signal to participants that they are dreaming. Four independent teams in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States are trying to establish complex two-way communication during sleep, using speech and asking questions that sleepers have never heard in their studies. They recruited 36 volunteers, including some experienced "lucid dreamers" and others who had never had a lucid dream before, but remembered at least one of their sleep a week.
Sleep sessions are scheduled at different times, with each lab using a different way of communicating with the sleeper, from oral questions to flashing lights. Sleepers are told to signal that they have entered a lucid dream, and answer questions by moving their eyes and face in a certain way - for example, by moving their eyes three times to the left.
As participants fell asleep, scientists monitored their brain activity, eye movement and facial muscle contractions - common indicators of the REM phase of sleep - using electroencephalogram helmets equipped with electrodes. Out of a total of 57 sleep sessions, six people reported having lucid dreams in 15 of them. In these tests, the researchers asked participants simple questions they had to answer with "yes" or "no," or mathematical tasks, such as 8-6. To respond, dreamers used the signals they were taught before falling asleep, which included a smile or frown, repeatedly moving the eyes to indicate a number, or in the German lab - moving their eyes on patterns that matched the Morse code.
The researchers asked 158 questions to lucid dreamers who answered correctly in 18.6% of the time, the researchers at Current Biology reported. 17.7% of their answers were not clear and 60.8% of the questions were not answered. According to the researchers, these numbers show that communication during sleep, even difficult, is possible.
This experiment provides a new insight into dream learning, says lead author Karen Concoli, a cognitive neurologist at Northwestern University. According to him, "almost everything that is known about dreams relies on retrospective reports given when a person is awake and they can be distorted."
The concept of lucid dreaming
Lucid dreaming is found in the writings of the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 4th century BC. A.D. and scientists have been observing it since the 1970s in experiments for the REM phase of sleep, when most dreams appear. One in two people has had at least one lucid dream, about 10% of people experience it once a month or more often.
While rare, this ability to recognize that you are in your sleep — and even to control certain aspects of it — can be improved with training. Lucid sleep is a form of metascience or awareness of your consciousness. Often lucid dreams are also defined by humans as very alive and real. Others say their lucid dreams are different every time.
