Real Time Communication With Lucid Dreamers

Researchers were able to communicate with people who were in REM sleep and asked them math problems and yes/no questions to prove the person was responding to questions and was communicating.

Researchers asked an 19-year-old American participant to subtract six from eight while he was in a lucid dream, and he correctly signaled the answer “two” with two eye movements from left to right. When asked again, he repeated the correct answer.

The researchers would wake the participant from sleep after achieving successful two-way communication, in order to obtain a dream report.

I, Brian Wang, have personally experienced Lucid dreaming. This is where you recognize that you are dreaming while you are in a dream and then are able to take control of the dream. I was able to do this with about a 30 percent success rate for about one month while in undergraduate university. However, this ended when I had a bad nightmare. I attempted to re-enter and fix the nightmare with lucid dreaming but I was not successful after about eight attempts.

Below are three techniques to train and initiate a Lucid Dream.

Current Biology – Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep

Dreams take us to a different reality, a hallucinatory world that feels as real as any waking experience. These often-bizarre episodes are emblematic of human sleep but have yet to be adequately explained. Retrospective dream reports are subject to distortion and forgetting, presenting a fundamental challenge for neuroscientific studies of dreaming. Here we show that individuals who are asleep and in the midst of a lucid dream (aware of the fact that they are currently dreaming) can perceive questions from an experimenter and provide answers using electrophysiological signals. We implemented our procedures for two-way communication during polysomnographically verified rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep in 36 individuals. Some had minimal prior experience with lucid dreaming, others were frequent lucid dreamers, and one was a patient with narcolepsy who had frequent lucid dreams. During REM sleep, these individuals exhibited various capabilities, including performing veridical perceptual analysis of novel information, maintaining information in working memory, computing simple answers, and expressing volitional replies. Their responses included distinctive eye movements and selective facial muscle contractions, constituting correctly answered questions on 29 occasions across 6 of the individuals tested. These repeated observations of interactive dreaming, documented by four independent laboratory groups, demonstrate that phenomenological and cognitive characteristics of dreaming can be interrogated in real time. This relatively unexplored communication channel can enable a variety of practical applications and a new strategy for the empirical exploration of dreams.

How to Lucid Dream

A 2017 study that Dr. Aspy and colleagues conducted tested the efficacy of three common techniques to initiate Lucid Dreams.

The first is called “reality testing.” This may involve verifying whether or not you are dreaming both in real life and during a dream.

For instance, throughout the day, a person may want to ask themselves, “Am I dreaming right now?” as they try to make their hand pass through a solid wall.

This technique relies on intention. In real life, the wall will remain solid and impenetrable, but in a dream, the hand will easily pass through it.

Another “reality check” is rereading a line of text. In real life, if we read the text on a poster, it will stay the same when we reread it. In a dream, however, the text will constantly shift.

Conducting these experiments repeatedly throughout the day may make it easier to remember to conduct them during dreams, thus allowing the dreamer to gain awareness of the dream.

Another technique is “waking back to bed.” This requires setting an alarm to wake oneself up around 5–6 hours after going to sleep.

Once awake, the person should aim to remain awake for a while before going back to sleep. This technique is supposed to immerse the sleeper immediately into REM, which is the phase of sleep during which they are most likely to experience a lucid dream.

Lucid dreaming may also occur through “mnemonic induction.” This is another technique that requires intent and lots of practice.

With mnemonic induction, a person must repeat to themselves — just before going to bed — a phrase such as, “Tonight, I will notice that I am dreaming,” so as to “program” themselves to achieve in-dream lucidity.

Dream journals and meditation
It also appears that those who find it easy to lucid dream do not have much trouble recalling their dreams on a regular basis.

“When it comes to lucid dreaming, the strongest predictor of whether you have lucid dreams or not is how good you are at remembering your ordinary dreams,” Dr. Aspy explained.

SOURCES- Medicine Today, Current Biology
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

41 thoughts on “Real Time Communication With Lucid Dreamers”

  1. Interesting article. To be honest, I have been studying the subject of lucid dreaming for a long time, but I have never been able to enter this state. Maybe some of you have information about good training sessions on how to enter a state of lucid dreaming? If you need a design, I can organize it through ramotion.

  2. Wow, incredible research! In general, science is moving forward. But in order to have good mental health, it is advisable to take care of the physical. For example, I take regular tests in the lab https://www.discountedlabs.com and know that the body is normal.

  3. Anecdotally, lucid dreaming seems to more common in the young adult age range. I'd like to see some research on that. I too was a lucid dreamer at that age, I'm not sure when it tapered off but looking back it may have been rotating watchstanding in the Navy not only broke my sleep pattern, but more significantly taught me to wake up completely immediately, precluding returning to the dream. Again like to see a study on when it occurs and when and why it stops.

  4. If you are American are you so unpatriotic that you would deliberately fart on our aircraft carriers? I like aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines. They remind me of Star Trek. It is sad that it is not peaceful exploration.

  5. A very interesting and very strange thing. If it existed, it would surely have existed the same, but not for sleep, but for ordinary life. But it would be cool to be able to record dreams and view them later. Can you imagine how this would help in some kind of therapy? I wonder what collectors dream about, who annoy people with calls and threats. It's good that there are lawyers like this paulmankin against them.

  6. The need for another reality, as it were, separate or even *above* ours, is driven by the repressed infant consciousness traumatized to such an extent that the repression is the only option. Such repressions are "global" rather than perhaps more traditional traumas, say incest, so they have this broad scope. This is all PROVEN by the standard pattern in Primal Therapy were such beliefs simply dissolve as the birth trauma is experienced and integrated into reality. Happens all the time. Check it out! primaltherapy dot com features a book called "Beyond Belief", the blurb is enuf.

  7. If self-awareness can be justified for when you're awake, then you automatically get it during dreaming because it's the same circuitry. Having specialized, non-self-aware dream circuits would cost more energy than simply reusing the waking circuits.

  8. Those are the mainstream theories, yes. What I find more mysterious is why we can have awareness in dreams.

    If dreams were was just an internal brain mechanism for learning and emotional processing, you won't need nor have the option to become self-aware and less do changes or create a narrative of your own.

    It's like near death experiences. If the brain was shutting down and the requirements for consciousness aren't there, there will be just unconsciousness, nothing, nada.

    But when dreaming, the brain is alive of course. It may well be an artifact of how consciousness works, with the sentience brain circuits being capable to work while the brain is in another mode. When people is tripping balls with LSD or other entheogens, they are self conscious as well.

    I find it just weird that we have such pointless capability. Being self aware in dreams simply serves no evolutionary purpose.

  9. I used to regularly have lucid dreams in which I could fly. I would be in some odd dream situation, often in some danger, and up in high place. And then I would recognize that I was in a dream, and if so, I could not get hurt. So I would leap off the high place. And then do this kind of "Hulk" leaping from place to place. Sometimes I would be able to do a kind of hovering, or propelling along with little urges to go forward, while floating, sometimes getting good at it. Often the dreams would end when I was trying to show other people that I could fly. Then I suppose I had fallen back into a regular dream.

    Based on several factors (readings, including Castaneda, Tibetan yogic practices, and Robert Moore's "Journeys Out of the Body"; training tapes from Moore's organization; a few personal experiences; and my spouse's experiences) I mostly, intellectually believe that lucid dreaming is a path to "astral dreams". Astral dreams are supposedly where your awareness enters your astral body and you then go do things in the real time, real world. My few supposed astral dreams had to do with communicating in a hazy way with people in situations that best I could tell had nothing whatever to do with my "real life". Those are experiences that Moore described.

    For me, this was another piece of evidence that consciousness is not limited to the brain, i.e. that there is a "transpersonal" consciousness. Other personal experiences have been much more clear and indelible.

  10. Well everyone knows that sleep is required for memory consolidation and rehearsal of skills learned during the day. So why dream? Because part of doing things in the real world is hallucinating the future consequences of actions. When you pick up a book from a table, you first hallucinate doing it. But we don't think of it as hallucination because it gets so smoothly integrated with sensory input.

  11. How nice that would be…I have often “woken up” from one dream into another. I am in strange bedrooms, and yet everything is familiar.

    Now to record dreams. The space battles I have seen need to be shared.

  12. If you want to laugh at the misfortunes of others, do a search on "shifting". 
    Seems there is a community of people on the internet that aren't aware of dreaming, and think that they actually get to shift to another universe in their sleep.
    They get all upset when other people don't believe them.

  13. Yes, one of my most frustrating dreams is where I discover a book or books that hold the great secret (of some sort) and I just can't read them.

  14. According to Janov, dreams are driven by emotions, and the content is abstract and not some sort of secret roadmap. The emotion of dreams may give a clue as to the repressed stuff, but also not all that helpful. The danger I see is overriding the emotional processing by *taking control*, an inherently repressive act. This cuts off another expression, and can lead to much worse symptoms.

  15. I was able to fix a couple of previous nightmares and also to take control and do interesting things. But I gave up on attempting it after that experience. Taking control and directing myself toward that nightmare in order to fix it was not productive.

    I believe Lucid dreaming was messing up my sleep patterns and how much rest I was really getting. During that time I also had the issue where I dreamed that I had woken up but had not woken up. Giving up on it trying to control, I very rarely had nightmares afterwards and also had better sleep.

  16. Upvoted for the need of scientific study.

    These subjective but real kind of perceptions (because more than one person have experienced them, as we can see even here), need to be better understood.

    These along with DMT trips to other dimensions and almost-death experiences, oh, and some children's past life memories are among the most baffling psychological phenomena without good explanations so far.

  17. It rarely happens to me, and I really, really wish that it did. I think this has to do with my sleeping habits. It has happened before though, and was amazing. OBEs, too, but that's a different conversation.

  18. Yo, what kind of caution? I do understand that being addicted to escape is always a worry especially with dreams like this, as well as with going further into an OBE. Of course, the whole thing with OBEs and not being able to get back "into" for body is totally bunk, since it doesn't work that way. Unless you're TRYING to allow a malevolent consciousness to connect to you. Even the, there are nuances. That's not at all how possession works, either. But, I digress.

    Are there instances of folks beginning trapped in a sleeping state because of this?

  19. I lucid dream a lot, probably around 30% of the time. The usual method I use to take control of the dream is to fly (yes, human flight just like in the fantasy stories). I have come to the conclusion that my ability to fly in my dreams is psychologically connected to my interest/pursuit of DIY anti-aging life extension.

  20. I sometimes realize that I am dreaming. Unfortunately I wake up immediately after that realization. Sometimes I suspect I'm dreaming, and remain asleep.

  21. It is all good. The real question is what is Lucid dreams?
    In many sacred teachings we are actually made from two connected beings dreaming reality, and in case of us human beings the solid one is more dominant while the ethereal one needs to be freed through the practice of dreaming for a much greater perception.

    All of this is waiting to be scientifically studied.

  22. Yeah, the subconscious (what 'letting go' probably really means) can concoct some serious weird stuff.

    For me, lucid dreaming is always followed by waking up. Maybe I just don't remember the times when I return to not be aware in the dream, but as far as I recall, when I become aware in the dream, I'm 'locked on' in awareness mode until I wake up.

    I noticed that this happens more often near the morning, rarely in the middle of the night.

    All this is fun stuff and I'd recommend people to give it a try with the simple techniques mentioned by Brian. But that's my view, it seems I don't have a lot of nightmares, compared to other people.

    Why we can lucid-dream and have a 'second life' inside our dreams is a total mystery for me, but we certainly can, by personal experience. Seems like pointless from the biological perspective.

    Same as the wild stuff we can see on some drugs like DMT and the reported almost-death experiences some people have.

  23. In my experience, the most fun thing to do if you get into a lucid dream, is to "give up control". I discovered that it's possible to make the conscious decision to let the dream go back to non-lucid. But since you're already partially aroused, the dream that occurs ends up being far more vivid and memorable than a normal dream. Yet it has an advantage over lucid dreams, in that you're not in control.

    Pure lucidity can get boring, because you're limited by your (mostly) conscious imagination. "Oh yay I can fly…now what?". But going from lucidity to non-lucidity is a whole other animal. I'm talking about real acid trip-type stuff.

  24. "gaining just enough awareness of your surroundings to do some task such as using the bathroom"

    You play a dangerous game, my friend.

  25. Lucid Acetaminophen dreams are the best. Being in an absolute clown show of a dream and knowing it is a dream is kind of fun.

    A couple of weeks ago I was sleeping off an annoying headache and took Tylenol. End result was a bizarro clown show lucid dream where I was aware that everything was a Acetaminophen induced clown show dream. Fun times!

  26. I have only had a couple lucid dreams that I recall, but in my early 20s I started having some out of body experiences. They always happened 2 or 3 days after a day in which I had smoked weed, interestingly enough, long after any effects of the weed of course. Started with moving my hand through the bed but with more experience I was eventually able to completely separate from my body and move across the room. Would have liked to explore further but lost the ability after a few months.

  27. It's fun but it's not very controllable.

    Even when lucid dreaming, you can change some things but not all. The brain has it's own agenda in the background all the time. I see it like a cheaper way to do acid trips that's already embedded in your body.

    Also, it requires some practice to not get too excited and wake up.

    While on VR you have push button control over it.

    But I agree that life would be different if we were more aware of that 3rd of our life when our awareness isn't here.

  28. I have never explicitly tested my intellectual prowess beyond "I'm dreaming!" because I immediately tend to derive that awareness to have fun.

    The only experience I recall is trying to read some books I saw in a dream bookshelf and being unable to, they were fuzzy, unreadable. So it seems your reading abilities aren't there.

  29. Yep. It does exist. I'd say most people have experienced it at least once. A few others, several times and even fewer control it.

    I used to have more control over my dreams, when I was a teen and in my 20s I learned to recognize the state and use that awareness to have more control.

    Things like making Dr. Strange like magic tricks and floating instead of walking and enjoying the scenery more.

    After that, I started losing that ability, and now it's far less often that I can recognize the dream state while dreaming.

    Of late, only happened to me when I started worrying in a dream about taking a bus due to the Covid lockdowns, only to realize I had floated to take that bus and hence I was dreaming!

    It was mostly fun, and such awareness helped me with the eventual nightmares, allowing me to recognize them and wake up. I noticed I mostly get them due to apnea or some numb arm/foot, so waking up sooner helps to fix the cause.

  30. I started lucid dreaming in my teens, back in the 70's. Long enough ago that I forget how I learned to do it; I think I was just dreaming one night and realized it, and that was it. The more challenging skill is what you might call "lucid sleep walking", gaining just enough awareness of your surroundings to do some task such as using the bathroom, and return to bed, without interrupting your sleep. That one's tough, I've rarely accomplished it.

    It's curious that a bad nightmare ended your lucid dreaming; Lucid dreaming almost completely ended my bad nightmares, because I could take control of them. The only nightmares I have now are more conceptual, dreaming that I'd become senile.

    Interesting research; While I'm aware while I'm dreaming that I AM dreaming, I've never been certain how much of my waking intellectual capacities I retained.

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