For the first time, researchers have had conversations involving novel questions and math problems with lucid dreamers, people who are aware that they are dreaming. The findings, from four labs and 36 participants, suggest people can receive and process complex external information while sleeping. Four independent teams in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States tried to establish complex two-way communication during dreams, using speech and asking questions the sleepers had never heard in their training. They recruited 36 volunteers, including some experienced lucid dreamers and others who had never experienced a lucid dream before but remembered at least one dream a week. The researchers first trained participants to recognize when they were dreaming, by explaining how lucid dreaming works and demonstrating cues (sounds, lights, or finger tapping) that they would present while dreamers slept. The idea was those cues would signal to participants that they were dreaming. Nap sessions were scheduled at different times: some at night, when people would regularly go to bed, and others early in the morning. Each lab used a different way to communicate with the sleeper, from spoken questions to flashing lights. Sleepers were told to signal they had entered a lucid dream and answer questions by moving their eyes and face in particular ways, by, for example, moving their eyes three times to the left.
As the participants fell asleep, the scientists monitored their brain activity, eye movement, and facial muscle contractions (common indicators of REM sleep) with electroencephalogram helmets outfitted with electrodes. Out of a total of 57 sleeping sessions, six individuals signaled they were lucid dreaming in 15 of them. In those tests, researchers asked the dreamers simple yes or no questions or math problems, like eight minus six. To answer, dreamers used the signals they had been taught before falling asleep, which included smiling or frowning, moving their eyes multiple times to indicate a sum, or, in the German lab, moving their eyes in patterns that matched Morse code. The researchers asked 158 questions of the lucid dreamers, who responded correctly 18.6% of the time, the researchers report today in Current Biology. The dreamers gave the wrong answer to only 3.2% of the questions; 17.7% of their answers were not clear and 60.8% of the questions got no response. The researchers say these numbers show the communication, even if difficult, is possible. After several questions, the dreamers were woken up and asked to describe their dreams. Some remembered the questions as part of a dream: One dreamer reported math problems coming out of a car radio. Another was at a party when he heard the researcher interrupting his dream, like a narrator in a movie, to ask him whether he spoke Spanish.
More information:
https://www.science.org/content/article/scientists-entered-peoples-dreams-and-got-them-talking