Can dreams be intervened?
Two scientists, one Turkish, found a way to communicate with dreamers during their sleep. What innovations can this development bring? Will we now be able to dream the dream we want and enter the dreams of others?
In his sensational science fiction movie Inception (2010), British director Christopher Nolan imagined his hero entering other people's dreams and even shaping their contents. What if this were real? Başak Türker and Delphine Oudiette, researchers at the Brain Institute in Paris, claimed in their article published in The Conversation that they had found a method to "open the door to dreams". We quote the highlights from the article: “Sometimes we wake up with vivid memories of our nightly adventures, while sometimes the impression of a dreamless night prevails. Research shows that we remember an average of one to three dreams per week. However, not everyone is equally successful in remembering these dreams. People who say they never dream make up about 2.7 to 6.5 percent of the population. These people often remember the dreams they had as children. The rate of those who say they have never dreamed in their lives is very low: 0.38 percent. Whether people remember their dreams or not depends on many factors such as gender or their curiosity about dreams. For example, women remember their dreams more often than men, and some keep a “dream diary” or record their dreams as soon as they wake up. The private and temporary nature of dreams makes them difficult for scientists to capture. However, today, thanks to the knowledge gained in the field of neuroscience, it is possible to classify a person's alertness state by analyzing brain activity, muscle tension and eye movements. Scientists can thus determine whether a person is asleep and in what stage of sleep (onset sleep, light slow wave sleep, deep slow wave sleep, or Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep): What these physiological data do not tell us is whether the sleeping person is dreaming or not. Because dreams can be seen in all stages of sleep. Physiological data also does not tell us what a person is dreaming about. Researchers also cannot access the dream experience as it occurs. Therefore, they are forced to rely on the dreamer's narrative after waking up, and there is no guarantee that this narrative will be faithful to what is going on in the sleeper's head. Moreover, to understand what is happening in the brain while we are dreaming and what purpose this activity serves, we need to be able to compare brain activity when dreams are occurring with when they are not. For all these reasons, it is imperative to determine exactly when dreams occur in order to advance dream science. To achieve this, it would be ideal to be able to communicate with sleeping people. So is this impossible? It's not for everyone. At this point, controllable (lucid) dreamers come into play. What is lucid dreaming? Most of us only realize we are dreaming when we wake up. Lucid dreamers, on the other hand, have the unique ability to be aware of the dreaming process during REM sleep, a sleep phase in which brain activity is closer to the wakefulness phase. Even more surprising, lucid dreamers can sometimes gain partial control over the course of their dreams. So they can fly away, make people appear or disappear, change the weather, or transform themselves into animals. In short, the possibilities are endless. Such lucid dreams may occur spontaneously or be developed with special training. The existence of lucid dreaming has been known since ancient times, but for a long time it was considered a rare phenomenon and not worthy of scientific research. Known for 44 years Such views changed thanks to a clever experiment conducted in the 1980s by psychologist Keith Hearne and psychophysiologist Stephen Laberge. These two researchers set out to prove that lucid dreamers are actually asleep when they realize they are dreaming. Drawing on the observation that REM sleep is characterized by rapid eye movements with one's eyes closed, they asked themselves the following question: Would it be possible to use this feature to ask the sleeper to send a “telegram” from his dream to the world around him? To find out, Hearne and Laberge studied lucid dreamers. They agreed with them on the telegram to be sent before falling asleep: As soon as the participants became aware that they were dreaming, they would have to make certain eye movements, such as moving their gaze from left to right three times. Dreamers did just that when they were actually in REM sleep. The new communication code allowed the researchers to detect dreaming stages in real time from then on. This work led to many research projects in which lucid dreamers act as undercover agents in the dream world, performing tasks (such as holding their breath in a dream) and reporting them to researchers using an eye code. It is now possible to examine the brain regions involved in lucid dreaming by combining such experiments with brain imaging techniques. This is about dreams and how they are constructed.
