I routinely control my own dreams. During a recent episode, in my dream laboratory, my experience went like this: I was asleep on a twin mattress in the dark lab room, wrapped in a cozy duvet and a blanket of silence. But I felt like I was awake. The sensation of being watched hung over me. Experimenters two rooms over peered at me through an infrared camera mounted on the wall. Electrodes on my scalp sent them signals about my brain waves. I opened my eyes—at least I thought I did—and sighed. Little specks of pink dust hovered in front of me. I examined them curiously. “Oh,” I then thought, realizing I was asleep, “this is a dream.”
In my dream I sat up slowly, my body feeling heavy. In reality I lay silently and moved my eyes left to right behind my closed eyelids. This signal, which I had learned to make through practice, was tracked by the electrodes and told the experimenters I was lucid: asleep yet aware I was dreaming. I remembered the task they had given me before I went to sleep: summon a dream character. I called out for my grandmother, and moments later simple black-and-white photographs of her appeared, shape-shifting and vague. I could sense her presence, a connection, a warmth rolling along my spine. It was a simple and meaningful dream that soon faded into a pleasant awakening.
Once I was awake, the scientists at the Dream Engineering Lab I direct at the University of Montreal asked me, through the intercom, about my perception of characters, any interactions with them and how they affected my mood on awakening. Even in her unusual forms, my grandmother had felt real, as if she had her own thoughts, feelings and agency. Reports from other dreamers often reflect similar sensations—the result of the brain’s striking ability in sleep to create realistic avatars we can interact with. Researchers suspect that these dreamy social scenarios help us learn how to interact with people in waking life.
Many people have had lucid dreams. Typically you are immersed in an experience, then something seems “off,” and you realize you are actually dreaming. Often people wake up right after they become lucid, but with practice you can learn how to remain lucid and try to direct what happens. In the lab we can prime sleepers to have lucid dreams by waking them and then prompting them as they fall back asleep. At home you can try waking up and visualizing a lucid dream (most effectively in the early morning), creating a strong intention to become lucid before falling asleep again.
In the past few years scientists have discovered that while someone is having a lucid dream, they can communicate with an experimenter in a control room, and that person can communicate with the dreamer, giving them instructions to do something within the dream. In a landmark paper published in 2021 in Current Biology, researchers in the U.S., the Netherlands, France and Germany provided evidence of two-way, real-time communication during lucid dreams. At two locations researchers presented spoken math problems to sleeping participants, who accurately computed the correct solution. When one team asked, “What is eight minus six?” the dreamers answered with two left-right eye movements. Another team asked yes-or-no questions, and lucid dreamers frowned to indicate “no” and smiled for “yes,” with their movements recorded by electrodes around their eyebrows and mouth.
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