Do you wish you could control what you dream? Apps are appearing that claim to be able to optimise sleep for self-improvement and better health.
This falls under the concept of ‘lucid dreaming’, the premise runs if you ever experience a dream while knowing that you are dreaming then this falls within the scope of the definition of ‘lucid dreaming’.
Is this something that works? Can it be scientifically verified? So far, the various at-home methods have not stood up to rigorous inquiry.
This could be about to change with research from neuroscientists at Northwestern University. The scientists have developed a method called targeted lucidity reactivation (TLR).
By adapting the TLR method the scientists conducted research using a smartphone app that links sensory stimulation with a lucid state of mind. This provided new evidence that the TLR method, at a basic level, works.
The experimental results demonstrated that the study participants improved while using the app to an average of 2.11 lucid dreams per week, up from an average of 0.74 lucid dreams over the prior week. The new research opens the door for more people to use dreaming for personal benefit.
This is based on a two-part approach of TLR. The first part is pre-sleep training provided via the app. The second part is reactivating lucidity with a sound cue during sleep.
The 19 participants who completed the first experiment each met the criteria of owning an Android phone, sleeping at least 7-8 hours per night and expecting they could fall back to sleep if woken up in the final two hours of the night.
Before sleep, participants first tested the app volume to ensure sensory cues were audible when their phone was placed face down near their pillow, but not so loud the cues would wake them up.
The app provided participants with nightly training before sleep that included a sound cue and directions to become lucid by becoming aware of their physical, mental and emotional state, and details of their surroundings. If the participant awoke from sleep, they responded to a prompt on their phone asking whether the sound cue woke them. They also completed a nightly dream log.
To determine whether lucid dreaming resulted from TLR rather than merely expectations or sleep disruption, a second experiment was conducted with a group of 120 app users. In this experiment, all participants received the nightly training, but on alternate nights control participants received a dummy sound cue or no sound cue during sleep.
On the first night of the experiment, when everyone received the real cue. Here, 17 percent of participants had lucid dreams. On the second night, those who received the real cue again maintained this rate of lucid dreaming, whereas only 5 percent of control participants had lucid dreams. Additional evidence of lucidity was provided in participants’ dream logs.
There are, however, issues to resolve. The risk of waking up users was a drawback of using the app method. Another downside was the inability to deliver cues when people entered rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the phase when lucid dreaming is most probable.
The next phase of research will experiment with wearable technology that can prevent undue awakening and can determine when users are likely in REM sleep, which may increase the success rate.
The study, “Provoking lucid dreams at home with sensory cues paired with pre-sleep cognitive training,” was published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition.
