Can you control your dreams?

May 30th, 2023

Written by: Barnes Jannuzi

Have you ever been sipping hot tea with Nelson Mandela and Amelia Earhart on top of the Pyramids of Giza… only to realize you were dreaming? Well maybe not, but nearly everyone has experienced the feeling of suddenly becoming aware they’re in a dream. Most people wake up very soon after realizing they are dreaming,but some are able to remain in control of their minds and bodies while in a dream state. The experience of controlling one’s mind and body while dreaming is called lucid dreaming. While lucid dreaming can be fun, some scientists believe it could also be used to treat disorders like persistent nightmares and narcolepsy, and to help us better understand consciousness.

How Scientists Study Lucid Dreams

Readers of PenneuroKnow’s article, The Dreaming Brain, will know that many of the most vivid dreams we remember upon waking occur during a part of sleep known as rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep. The study of lucid dreams has been most studied during REM sleep1. However, one of the primary reasons researchers have focused on lucid dreams during REM sleep is actually unrelated to the vividness of the dreams, but rather because of an amazing property of REM sleep. Individuals in REM sleep are unable to move a muscle, with the exception of those related to breathing, and as the name would suggest, eye movements. 

These eye movements during REM sleep have proven to be the key to studying lucid dreams. When lucid dreamers move their eyes in a dream, the eyes on their sleeping bodies move in the same way2. Using an ingenious idea to have dreamers make a practiced pattern of eye movements while dreaming, dreamers are able to signal to scientists that they are experiencing a lucid dream while it is happening!1 By watching for when dreamers signal, scientists are able to record the brain activity that happens during a lucid dream.

Lucid Dreaming as a Therapeutic Tool

Now that researchers have a clear sense of what it means to lucid dream, they’re starting to think about how lucid dreaming could be a therapeutic tool to treat sleep disorders. One study aimed at treating nightmares3 showed that patients reported psychological relief if they were able to become lucid during a nightmare. So, if doctors can teach patients how to lucid dream, this could provide relief to patients suffering from nightmares. This could be particularly helpful for individuals suffering from narcolepsy, where nightmares are a common symptom4. 

Additionally, individuals who are comatose or in a state of reduced consciousness are extremely difficult to treat correctly because it is challenging to know how conscious and aware they are. Better understanding brain activity during different states of consciousness such as lucid dreaming compared to normal sleeping/dreaming may allow doctors to determine the level of awareness of their patients and provide the appropriate treatment.5 For example, if a patient suffering from coma had brain activity resembling a state of higher awareness such as lucid dreaming, it could help inform doctors how healthy their brain is, helping the doctor to make the best choice in providing care.

Unlocking the Secrets of the Mind
Therapeutic intervention is not the only thing that is drawing attention to the study of lucid dreams. “How do we think?”, and “how are we aware of our own thinking?” are two questions that have boggled the minds of humans for millennia. These great mysteries of the mind are fickle and complex, proving challenging to both define and study. As a result of this, researchers and philosophers have only scratched the surface of what consciousness is and have been forced to try to think outside the box in order to better understand it. Some researchers believe that the key to understanding these questions might be found by better understanding what is different between the brain’s activity during different conscious states and have turned to lucid dreaming. 

Lucid dreams pose a unique opportunity when they are compared with normal dreaming or being awake. When you are in normal REM sleep dreaming, you can have many thoughts, and feelings, but your awareness of and understanding of your own thought process (aka. “meta-cognition”) is not present like it is when you are awake. In other words, when you are dreaming in normal REM sleep you are unaware that you are dreaming, but when you are awake you know you are awake. In contrast, lucid dreaming possesses elements of both of these conscious states. During a lucid dream, you are aware that you are dreaming while you are dreaming. By comparing the brain’s activity in each of these states, scientists are attempting to isolate and understand which brain signals cause not only thinking, but awareness of one’s own thoughts6,7,8. If successful, these endeavors would take us one step closer to answering the big questions of consciousness. 

Challenges in Studying The Dreaming Brain

All of the studies above show great promise, however, lucid dreaming is difficult to study, which has made understanding brain activity during lucid dreaming challenging. It is notoriously difficult to find people who can reliably lucid dream in their own beds, let alone in a laboratory setting. Scientists often have to test one person over many nights to observe just one episode of lucid dreaming. This extremely low subject/dream count has plagued the field of lucid dream research leading to mixed and sometimes conflicting findings about characteristic activity in and brain regions associated with lucid dreams. 

Helping People Lucid Dream

The difficulty of attaining a lucid dream poses a major obstacle both for researchers studying lucid dreams, and doctors who wish to use lucid dreaming as a therapeutic tool. This means that there is great interest in making the difficult process of achieving a lucid dream easier. Therefore, scientists have developed creative methods to attempt to invoke lucid dreams in participants either by waking them repeatedly during sleep9, giving participants specific drugs10, or even through electrical stimulation of their brains11. These methods have had mixed results, and although some are promising, there is still a lot of work to be done before lucid dreams are easily capturable in a laboratory setting.

Dream On

Full understanding of lucid dreams has proved to be as elusive as the dreams themselves, however the pursuit is well worth it. Breakthroughs may help those suffering from persistent nightmares or medical conditions, or potentially even be the key to understanding one of the most fascinating and difficult to study products of the human brain: consciousness. Whatever the case may be, next time you find yourself atop a pharoes’ tomb in a dream with a president and a pilot, try to take back control of your mind without waking up!

References

  1. Baird, B., Mota-Rolim, S. A., & Dresler, M. (2019). The cognitive neuroscience of Lucid dreaming. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 100, 305–323. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.03.008 
  2. Dement W, Wolpert EA. The relation of eye movements, body motility, and external stimuli to dream content. J Exp Psychol. 1958 Jun;55(6):543-53. doi: 10.1037/h0040031. PMID: 13563767.
  3. Holzinger, B., Klösch, G., & Saletu, B. (2015). Studies with lucid dreaming as add-on therapy to gestalt therapy. Acta Neurologica Scandinavica, 131(6), 355–363. https://doi.org/10.1111/ane.12362 
  4. Michael Rak, MD and others, Increased Lucid Dreaming Frequency in Narcolepsy, Sleep, Volume 38, Issue 5, 1 May 2015, Pages 787–792, https://doi.org/10.5665/sleep.4676
  5. Laureys, S., Perrin, F., & Brédart, S. (2007). Self-consciousness in non-communicative patients. Consciousness and Cognition, 16(3), 722–741. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2007.04.004 
  6. Martin Dresler, PhD and others, Neural Correlates of Dream Lucidity Obtained from Contrasting Lucid versus Non-Lucid REM Sleep: A Combined EEG/fMRI Case Study, Sleep, Volume 35, Issue 7, 1 July 2012, Pages 1017–1020, https://doi.org/10.5665/sleep.1974
  7. Oudiette, D., Dodet, P., Ledard, N., Artru, E., Rachidi, I., Similowski, T., & Arnulf, I. (2018). REM sleep respiratory behaviours match mental content in Narcoleptic Lucid Dreamers. Scientific Reports, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-21067-9 
  8. Elisa Filevich, Martin Dresler, Timothy R. Brick, Simone Kühn
    Journal of Neuroscience 21 January 2015, 35 (3) 1082-1088; DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3342-14.2015
  9. Aspy, D. J., Delfabbro, P., Proeve, M., & Mohr, P. (2017). Reality testing and the mnemonic induction of lucid dreams: Findings from the national Australian lucid dream induction study. Dreaming, 27(3), 206–231. https://doi.org/10.1037/drm0000059
  10. LaBerge, S. (2001). The paradox and promise of lucid dreaming: Research update: Cholinergic stimulation of lucid dreaming; voluntary control of auditory perception during REM lucid dreams. 2001. Berkeley, CA: International Association for the Study of Dreams.
  11. Stumbrys, T., Erlacher, D., & Schredl, M. (2013). Testing the involvement of the prefrontal cortex in lucid dreaming: A tDCS study. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(4), 1214–1222. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2013.08.005 

Cover Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash

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