Scientists have identified a new phenomenon that they describe as “interactive dreaming,” in which people experiencing deep sleep and lucid dreams are able to follow instructions, answer simple yes-or-no questions, and even to solve basic math problems.
In addition to adding a whole new level of understanding to what happens to our brains when we dream, the new study could eventually teach us how to train our dreams – to help us reach a certain goal, for example, or to treat a certain mental health problem.
There is much about sleep psychology that remains a mystery, including the rapid eye movement (REM) stage in which dreams usually occur. The ability to receive responses from dormitories in real time, rather than relying on subsequent reports, could be extremely helpful.
“We found that individuals in REM sleep can interact with an experimenter and engage in real-time communication,” says psychologist Ken Paller of Northwestern University. “We have also shown that dreamers are able to understand questions, engage in working memory operations and produce answers.
“Most people might predict that this would not be possible – that people will either wake up when asked a question or not answer, and they certainly will not understand a question without misinterpreting it.”
The researchers worked with 36 people in experiments in four different laboratories. One volunteer had narcolepsy and frequently experienced lucid dreaming, while others varied in their experience with lucid dreaming.
During the deepest stages of sleep, monitored by electroencephalogram (EEG) instruments, scientists interacted with study participants through spoken sound, flashing lights, and physical touch: sleepers were asked to answer simple questions. math, to count light flashes or physical touches and to answer basic questions with yes or no (such as “can you speak spanish?”).
The answers were given by previously agreed eye movements or facial muscle movements. During 57 sleep sessions, at least one correct answer to a question was observed in 47 percent of the sessions in which the lucid dream was confirmed by the participant.
Confirmation of lucid dream states was done in an orbital manner, the sleeping answers having to be agreed by several witnesses.
A summary of the experiments. (Konkoly et al., Current Biology 2021)
“We put the results together because we felt that the combination of the results from four different laboratories using different approaches most convincingly attests to the reality of this two-way communication phenomenon,” says neurologist Karen Konkoly of Northwestern University.
“In this way, we see that different means can be used to communicate.”
The people involved in the study were usually awakened after a successful response to get them to report their dreams. In some cases, the external entrances were remembered as being outside or superimposed in the dream; in others, they came through something inside the dream (like a radio).
In the published study, researchers compare trying to communicate with lucid dreamers to trying to get in touch with an astronaut in space, and the immediacy of the answers makes this new approach so interesting.
Research could be useful in the future study of dreams, memory and how important sleep is for fixing memories instead. It could also be useful in the treatment of sleep disorders and, below, it could even provide us with a way to train what we see in our dreams.
“These repeated observations of interactive dreaming, documented by four independent laboratory groups, demonstrate that the phenomenological and cognitive characteristics of dreaming can be questioned in real time,” the researchers write in their paper.
“This relatively unexplored communication channel may allow for a variety of practical applications and a new strategy for empirical dream exploration.”
The research was published in Current biology.