Science of Everything: Lucid Dreaming
By Stephanie Sorich, C2ST Correspondent
We’ve all woken up to remember a strange dream. Maybe you were performing a concert at Madison Square Garden, and then given an award by your third grade teacher— but wait, that wasn’t your third grade teacher, it was Jennifer Lopez. And that wasn’t Madison Square Garden, it was the break room at your first ever job.
For many of us, dreams feel real while we’re in them simply because we don’t notice the oddities until we wake up. But a select few experience lucid dreams, where they can actually discern they’re dreaming while it’s happening, giving them the ability to control the dream while they’re in it.
“When you’re asleep, you really have no capacity to question where you are and if you’re dreaming, or which state you are [in],” Dr. Gabriela Torres Platas, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern’s Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, explained. “You take everything for granted. You’re seeing unicorns and you’re like, ‘oh yeah, unicorns.’ That capacity is gone. So the idea is that lucid dreamers can turn that on during a dream where most people can’t.”
Lucid dreamers are able to become aware of and reflect on their surroundings, a process known as metacognition. So why can some people suddenly reawaken (pun intended) this process? Researchers don’t really know.
“I don’t think we have any scientific evidence that there is a gene or a condition that predisposes people for lucid dreaming. So then there are many different hypotheses, it’s a very new field,” Dr. Torres Platas said.
In an effort to understand what happens in the brain during lucid dreaming, researchers like Dr. Torres Platas will observe participants while they sleep, monitoring their brain activity and physiological reactions during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the sleep stage associated with dreaming and, most specifically, lucid dreaming. Dr. Torres Platas explained that while in this stage, study participants experience muscle paralysis, breathing changes, and, of course, rapid eye movements. These physiological signs are tracked by researchers to determine when they are most likely to experience lucid dreaming.
Lucid dreaming is very rare, meaning that observing natural occurrences of lucid dreaming is equally as rare. To combat this, researchers can actually teach participants to flick on that switch of awareness while they’re asleep.
“In the lab, we use something called targeted lucidity reactivation. We usually have a basic three beeps, and before they go to sleep, you condition the participants that every time they hear it, they question their environment,” Dr. Torres Platas explained. “When they go into REM sleep, we can play the sound with the idea that in their dream, they’re going to hear the sound and then they’re going to remember to start questioning this state.”
By tracking when participants are in REM sleep, researchers can isolate specific periods of time to measure brain activity. Then, if the participant successfully begins to lucid dream, researchers can analyze the differences in brain activity.
As Dr. Torres Platas stated, this field is very new and requires far more research before any definitive statements can be made about how lucid dreaming occurs. There are resources for those who would like to explore the world of lucid dreaming for themselves, though results will likely be mixed. For now, I will be walking my unicorn and waiting for more research to— oh no, did you hear those three beeps? Not again!
“Lucid Dreaming as Metacognition: Implications for Cognitive Science” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810084710142?via%3Dihub
