Dreams most often occur during the 'Rapid eye movement sleep phase' (also known as REM sleep). As you often find yourself in a completely different world during this sleep phase, it might not be evident that real-time communication with others who are not asleep is feasible. Nonetheless, a group of scientists discovered that it is possible for dreaming people to recognize questions from the outside world and even answer them. They published their findings in Current Biology.
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Although dreams are so common that they can almost be classified as an everyday experience, we know surprisingly little about them. Science has yet to define their purpose sufficiently. It has proven to be a difficult task to even accurately study the content of dreams as relying on people's descriptions of dreams is laden with forgotten details and distortions. A group of scientists elected to go for an interesting approach to generate more accurate data and circumvent these issues. They tried to ask questions to participants while they were experiencing lucid dreams. Lucids dreams are a type of dream where the person who has the dream becomes aware that they are in a dream.
The researchers found that people that were in the mids of their REM sleep could, in fact, answer questions and engage in real-time dialogue. The paper published in Current Biology is somewhat unusual as it involves four independently carried out experiments that apply various means to reach a similar goal. The four experiments were conducted at different Universities. One at Osnabrueck University in Germany, one at the Rotterdam-based Radboud University in the Netherlands, one at Sorbonne University in France, and one at Northwestern University in the United States.
Karen Konkloly, one of the Northwestern University researchers, explained in a press release that the teams decided to combine their results because they felt that the combination of findings from four separate labs using different approaches most convincingly attests to the reality of this phenomenon of two-way communication. Konkloly: 'In his way, we see that different means can be used to communicate.'
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Overall, the researchers discovered that it was plausible for people to tell the difference between various sensory stimuli, comprehend instructions, do simple math, and answer yes-or-no questions while dreaming. The participants responded by contracting facial muscles or by utilizing eye movements. This new type of communication is now referred to as 'interactive dreaming.'
This new way of communication opens up many possibilities when it comes to researching dreams in the future. There are plans to study people's cognitive skills while they are dreaming versus when they are awake. It also opens up a new way to verify the precision of dream reports from test subjects. Interactive dreaming might also prove useful outside the world of scientific research. It might offer a new method to cope with nightmares or improve techniques that aim to solve mental problems during sleep.
If you are interested in more details about the studies that were conducted, be sure to check out the paper published in Current Biology listed in the further reading section below.
Further reading:
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