Scientists stunned after communicating with people while they were dreaming

“Eight minus six,” a scientist, fully awake, asked. The response “two” came from the mind of a person who was asleep inside a neuroscience laboratory outside Chicago. This dialogue was part of an experiment in which researchers attempted to communicate with people in their dreams. They found that dreamers can follow instructions, solve simple math problems, and answer basic yes-no questions without even waking up. It's like “trying to communicate with an astronaut in another world,” they said, as per the study published in the journal Current Biology.

When a person goes to sleep, the outer world shuts down from their consciousness, but a new world, the inner world or the dream world, wakes up. In Christopher Nolan’s movie “Inception” some thieves inject new ideas into another person’s mind by influencing them in their dream state. In this study, researchers did the same – they proved that communication with a sleeping person in a dreaming state is possible.

In the paper titled “Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep,” the researchers refer to this dialogue with terms like “interactive dreaming.” They interacted with the dreaming person when they reached the REM sleep stage.

REM implies the “rapid eye movement” phase of sleep in which lucid dreaming can occur. The researchers used polysomnographic data to confirm that study participants had reached the REM stage of sleep. “We found that individuals in REM sleep can interact with an experimenter and engage in real-time communication,” said senior author Ken Paller. “We also showed that dreamers are capable of comprehending questions, engaging in working-memory operations, and producing answers,” per Northwestern University News. The researchers communicated directly with sleeping participants by asking them questions and having them respond with eye or facial movements during lucid dreams.

According to ScienceDirect, a “lucid dream” is a dream during which the dreamer is aware of the fact that he or she is dreaming and therefore often can consciously influence the dream content. Lucid dreams can evoke lucidity (clarity) about various aspects of the mind such as state of consciousness, freedom of choice, waking life, perception, and memory recollection. For people who wish to fly like a bird, walk on water, or visit another planet, or master a skill, lucid dreaming is a marvelous tool. Lucid dreaming enables a person to program their subconscious to achieve their dreams, per the National Science Foundation.

Antonio Zadra from the University of Montreal for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine explained in a TED Talk, that experience during these dreams can have a remarkable effect on the brain. Not only can it heal nightmares, but also fosters creativity, and improves motor skills like skiing or playing darts. It allows a person to explore and interact with parts of their mind that otherwise remain unconscious in a wakefulness state. Only about 20 percent of people report having lucid dreams even once a month.

Speaking to Live Science, study author Karen Konkoly said that she didn’t believe, at first, that communication with a dreamer was possible. But when a dreamer answered, she was surely wonderstruck and curious for more. She, along with fellow researchers, did this experiment while participants were dreaming because they believed that dream reports after waking up are almost always distorted. “Memories of dreams can be missing some parts of dreams and can be distorted and incorrect, so if that’s all we have to go on, then building a solid science of dreaming will be difficult,” said Ken Paller, per BBC Science Focus.

To experiment, researchers taped electrodes on the participants' heads, to measure their brainwaves; next to their eyes, to track eye movements; and on their chin, to measure muscle activity. The data from these electrodes informed researchers about when the participant was drifting into REM sleep because this is the most probable stage where lucid dreams occur, explained Konkoly.

Four separate experiments were conducted in labs in the U.S., Germany, France, and the Netherlands. While the participants would doze off into REM sleep, the researchers employed several techniques to extract information from their minds. For instance, they asked spoken questions, gave them encoded messages in flashing lights, played beep tones, and did physical tapping on their bodies. In some cases, the person who entered a lucid dreaming state would respond with facial and eye movements which gave a signal on the electrodes.

"Such two-way communication — from outside to inside the dream and back out again — is something that may seem to belong to the domain of science fiction," Pilleriin Sikka, senior lecturer in cognitive neuroscience at Sweden's University, told Live Science, "Given how challenging it is to induce lucid dreams in the laboratory and that the study was carried out by four independent laboratory groups, the researchers' effort is remarkable.” Sikka, however, added that this experiment cannot be generalized as just 6 of 36 participants responded during lucid dreaming. However, researchers suggested that this process could be utilized for purposes of healing emotional trauma or learning a new skill, according to the study.

Robert Stickgold, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, told Live Science that the results of the study were groundbreaking. "Two-way, real-time communication between researchers and lucid dreamers immersed in REM sleep offers a new and exciting window into the study of dreams and dreaming," Stickgold said. He added that it is still doubtful how easily these findings can be extended to real-life applications.

Some footage from these experiments was published by NOVA in a PBS documentary called "Dream Hackers: Bridge to Your Hidden Brain" on YouTube.