This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life by Rahul Jandial

Author:Rahul Jandial [Jandial, Rahul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, Life Sciences, Neuroscience, Self-Help, Dreams, Health & Fitness, Sleep, Psychology, Neuropsychology, Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
ISBN: 9780593655719
Amazon: 0593655710
Publisher: Penguin Life
Published: 2024-06-03T22:00:00+00:00

The New Frontier of Lucid Dreaming

Aside from the eye-movement signaling when a lucid dream begins, researchers have no objective signs of what is happening inside a lucid dream. And it’s not possible to signal when a lucid dream ends. It seems the fragility of a lucid dream likely rests on its very nature as a hybrid and delicate state of consciousness.

Even with limits such as the ephemeral qualities of lucid dreams, researchers have found new and inventive ways to take lucid dreaming farther than anyone thought possible. They’ve been able to train subjects, often students with no prior experience with lucid dreaming, to respond to flashing lights as they sleep with the left-right-left-right (L-R-L-R) eye movements. Some test subjects can even use the eye movements as a “timestamp” when they are beginning or ending prearranged tasks. That in itself is remarkable.

What is utterly astonishing is that researchers and dreamers have now engaged in two-way communication, back-and-forth interactions with prompts from researchers and responses from their dreaming subjects. This would have been considered an impossibility only a few years ago. Dreamers are able to process words or signals from the waking world while demonstrably remaining in REM sleep.

With their bodies paralyzed by REM sleep, dreamers have even answered spoken yes-no questions from researchers. In one study, the lucid dreamer used eye movements to respond to the question: “Do you speak Spanish?” The test subject later reported that he was dreaming he was at a house party and the question seemed to be coming from outside, like the narrator of a movie.

We’re not yet sure how this is possible, but there are reports in the academic literature that offer some insight into potential neurobiological underpinnings. In one case study, a 26-year-old woman and 37-year-old man both had strokes in the thalamus. Following their strokes, they began having frequent lucid dreams. The lucid dreams lasted for about a month for each of these patients before tapering off, possibly as their brains healed. Could the lucid dreams in these two patients have been caused by a malfunctioning of the brain’s built-in arousal mechanism?

Remember, when we’re sleeping, we are not completely shut off from the world around us. Instead, a process called thalamic gating allows our bodies to monitor sounds for something alarming, or an unusual sound that signals danger. When noises or some other sensory information is deemed a sign of danger, the thalamus relays the information to the frontal lobes, arousing the sleeper.

Perhaps something similar is happening in the thalamus of healthy people who are lucid dreamers. Maybe lights, sounds, and voices that are normally filtered out during dreaming are now seen or heard, even if they are still incorporated into the dream setting. It’s likely why people who are dreaming lucidly can hear questions from researchers as though they are coming through walls or in other unreal ways.

In an experiment at Northwestern University’s Cognitive Neuroscience Program, PhD candidate Karen Konkoly was able to get lucid dreamers to do something mind-blowing: solve simple math problems while they were dreaming.

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