Preamble of lucid dream
Recently, the weather has started to turn cooler, and I occasionally wake up in the morning. I remember one night when I was deep in sleep, but I kept waking up in the middle of the night with dreams, one after another, so I couldn’t tell whether it was reality or illusion. Is this a lucid dream?
Exploring lucid dreaming
In February of this year, Science published a journal related to “dreaming”. The main idea was the movie “Inception”, in which scientists tried to explore whether there is a so-called “lucid dream“. It is interesting to note that scientists have always thought that sleep and wakefulness are two separate dimensions – the brain is separated from the world when people are asleep – but experiments have found that people can still receive and process complex external information during sleep. One of the two people known so far has had such a dream at least once.
The source
Lucid dream was first proposed by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, and as the name implies, the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming. Most dreams are known to occur during the REM phase of the sleep cycle (Rapid eye movement phase), and scientists have attempted to “enter” the subject’s lucid dream with light, sound, and stimuli, and communicate with them. Unfortunately, the response received was very small.
Experimentation and Research
In more detail, four teams in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States took 36 volunteers (who did not all have lucid dreams) and used lectures and questions to communicate with the subjects in their dreams. The scientists communicated with the subjects through sound, light, and percussion to confirm that the subjects knew they were in a lucid dream.
During the dream, the subject responds to the scientist’s questions through eye rolls. The scientists monitored brain activity, facial muscle activity and eye movement changes during lucid dreaming, and showed that 6 out of 15 people knew they were having a lucid dream. Of the 158 questions asked, the subjects got 29 questions correct, with a correct rate of 18.6% and an incorrect rate of 3.2%. 17.7% of the subjects’ answers could not be judged, and another 60.8% of the questions were not answered.
Conclusion
Although there are no clear applications for lucid dreaming yet, this conclusion is exciting for the academic community – scientists have at least shown that it is possible to talk to subjects in the dream state in real time. We look forward to further progress in solving the mystery of human dreaming.
Reference
Science: Scientists entered people’s dreams and got them ‘talking’ 🔗
Baird, B., S. A. Mota-Rolim and M. Dresler (2019). “The cognitive neuroscience of lucid dreaming.” Neurosci Biobehav Rev 100: 305-323. 🔗
Simple Understanding of Sleep 🔗
Images are from pixabay.com 🔗
