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Humans spend about a third of their lives sleeping, and while most of us dream regularly, some people remember their dreams better than others. However, scientists know surprisingly little about why and how we experience dreams.
In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we explore new research from a French sleep institute that reveals how we can learn more by communicating with people while dreaming.
It’s difficult to study people who are dreaming. Researchers can tell with great precision when someone is asleep using electrodes that sense brain activity, but there are no neural markers for dreams. That is, all you have to do is ask about the dream when someone wakes up. It is impossible to know when they actually dreamed or what was actually happening, as they may have forgotten details.
Dream researchers realized in the 1980s that one special group of people could help open a window into the dream world. It’s a lucid dreamer. These people have the ability to recognize when they are dreaming but are still asleep, and may be able to control what happens in their dreams. Experiments on lucid dreamers have shown that during REM sleep they can move their eyes from side to side to indicate to researchers that they are dreaming.
Researchers Basak Turker and colleagues at the Paris Brain Institute wanted to go a step further and see if lucid dreamers can receive and respond to information while dreaming.
We thought that perhaps they were aware of the environment in which they slept and could receive information at the same time.
They hired lucid dreamers from the institute’s sleep lab to perform some experiments, and their theory worked. He was able to communicate with them. He smiled when they asked if he liked chocolate, and frowned when they asked him if he liked soccer.
Read more: Dream research: Scientists discover new communication channel with dreamers
They then went on to conduct further experiments with non-lucid dreamers to see if some of them could communicate with the waking world while dreaming. And it turns out it can be done.
To learn more about dream communication, listen to an interview with Başak Türker and Lionel Cavicchioli, health medicine editor of The Conversation in France, on The Conversation Weekly podcast.
A transcript of this episode will be available soon.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Katie Flood with assistance from Mend Mariwany. Gemma Ware is the show’s executive producer. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens and theme music was by Neeta Sarl. Stephen Khan is our Global Editor-in-Chief, Alice Mason runs our social media, and Soraya Nandy handles transcription.
You can find us on X, formerly known as Twitter. @TC_Audio, on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or by email. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily email here.
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