Dreams take people to a different reality, a hallucinatory world that feels as real as any waking experience. These often-bizarre episodes are emblematic of human sleep and yet, the research community knows more about the moon than it does about dreaming. A key problem here is that, unlike an astronaut returning from the lunar surface who can recall what they saw with reasonable accuracy, the dreams that people have quickly get distorted and forgotten when they wake up. Given these challenges, there has been an intense interest in working out how to ask dreamers questions while they are dreaming and have them answer without waking them up. Now a team led by Ken Paller at Northwestern University is revealing that they have figured out how to do this and, yes, the results are straight out of the film Inception.
The researchers took aim at lucid dreams as these are dreams where people are vaguely aware that what they are experiencing is not quite real and have some level of consciousness. This led the researchers to suspect that, if done right, they might be able to get questions heard by dreamers and possibly answered too. To manage this, they worked with 35 people. Some had a long history of frequent lucid dreaming and some were given exercises that helped them to lucid dream more often. All participants were trained to make eye movements or contract facial muscles to answer questions when they encountered them.
The questions were all basic counting or mathematics queries. They were delivered via light flashes, touch (taps on the arm) or audio. In total, the team attempted two-way communication during sleep in 57 sessions. In 26% of these sessions, participants successfully signalled that they received the message. In 47% of these signal-verified lucid-dreaming episodes, the team obtained at least one correct response to an experimental query.
After they had woken up, all participants correctly reported when they had received experimenters’ questions, however, the events of communication were often recalled in a distorted manner. Many participants reported that signals sent by the researchers were transmitted through components of the dream. For example, one participant reported that an audio question was heard as if played through a radio during a party while another reported that four flashes of light sent by the researchers manifested as a light in the dream flickering on four times. Intriguingly, details of communications that were recalled in dream reports taken afterwards often diverged from the recordings made during the dream. For example, participants frequently reported a mathematics problem that differed from the one that had been presented to them (i.e. they would say they saw five or six flashes when only four were given) even though they actually gave a correct response of four with their eye movements whilst dreaming.
These findings refute the common belief that it is pointless to try to communicate with people who are asleep to gain knowledge about their dreams. On the contrary, the collection of results described by Dr Paller constitutes proof-of-concept of two-way communication during sleep. he argues that this opens the door to a new approach for scientific exploration of the dream state.
You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this here or listen to my podcast with The Intelligence on this topic here.