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Forerunner

Resetufologist
The Fallen
Oct 30, 2017
14,579
www.sciencealert.com

Scientists Found a Way to Communicate With People Who Are Asleep And Dreaming

Scientists have identified a new phenomenon they describe as "interactive dreaming", where people experiencing deep sleep and lucid dreams are able to follow instructions, answer simple yes-or-no questions, and even solve basic mathematics problems.

Scientists have identified a new phenomenon they describe as "interactive dreaming", where people experiencing deep sleep and lucid dreams are able to follow instructions, answer simple yes-or-no questions, and even solve basic mathematics problems.

As well as adding a whole new level of understanding to what happens to our brains when we're dreaming, the new study could eventually teach us how to train our dreams – to help us towards a particular goal, for example, or to treat a particular mental health problem.

"We found that individuals in REM sleep can interact with an experimenter and engage in real-time communication," says psychologist Ken Paller from Northwestern University. "We also showed that dreamers are capable of comprehending questions, engaging in working-memory operations, and producing answers.

"Most people might predict that this would not be possible – that people would either wake up when asked a question or fail to answer, and certainly not comprehend a question without misconstruing it."

During the deepest stages of sleep, as monitored by electroencephalogram (EEG) instruments, scientists interacted with the study participants through spoken audio, flashing lights, and physical touch: the sleepers were asked to answer simple maths questions, to count light flashes or physical touches, and to respond to basic yes or no questions (like "can you speak Spanish?").

Answers were given through eye movements or facial muscle movements agreed in advance. Across 57 sleep sessions, at least one correct response to a query was observed in 47 percent of the sessions where lucid dreaming was confirmed by the participant.

Confirmation of the lucid dreaming states was done in a blinded fashion, with sleeper responses needing to be agreed upon by several witnesses.

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The research could be helpful in the future study of dreams, memory, and how important sleep is for fixing memories in place. It might also come in useful in the treatment of sleeping disorders, and further down the line might even give us a way to train what we see in our dreams.

"These repeated observations of interactive dreaming, documented by four independent laboratory groups, demonstrate that phenomenological and cognitive characteristics of dreaming can be interrogated in real time," write the researchers in their paper.

"This relatively unexplored communication channel can enable a variety of practical applications and a new strategy for the empirical exploration of dreams."
 

excelsiorlef

Bad Praxis
Member
Oct 25, 2017
73,316
Wake me up inside (Interview me)
Call my name and make me do some math (Don't wake me up)
Ask me yes or no (I can't wake up)
Before my rem's no go (Instruct me )
Contact me from the dreams I've become

Bring me to science
I've been having a lie
There are dreams inside
Bring me to science
 

wwm0nkey

Member
Oct 25, 2017
15,553
can this be used to trigger lucid dreams please? Would pay soooooooooooo much for that.
 

ItIsOkBro

Happy New Year!!
The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
9,485
this will eventually lead to companies making us do dream overtime to solve problems
 

Pbae

Member
Oct 26, 2017
3,223
I wonder if this could be used for coma patients.
I was thinking the same thing and googled whether or not people dream and it seems it's dependent on the severity of the coma. If it's severe, patients describe the sensation as closing your eyes and opening them again only to awaken after time has passed. But even for those cases there seemed to be a few descriptions of being "pulled out" of the nothingness they experienced.
I really hope it does pave a way for treatments for comatose patients.
 

Dr. Mario

Member
Oct 27, 2017
13,841
Netherlands
That's cool an all but I haven't had a lucid dream in years. And I certainly never remember them. How do the participants do this frequently enough for the experiment to work?
 

mutantmagnet

Member
Oct 28, 2017
12,401
You jest but I always did think it was feasible to push humanity in the direction of the Sleepers as described in Eve Online. Haven't you ever thought of something that was difficult to solve go to sleep and wake up with the answer before?

I've experienced that and thus I believe we can do a bunch of mental calculations in our slep in certain ways better than we are awake.

But in our capitalistic society I shudder to think if just to compete with machines we need to punch in to work while sleeping :/
 
Oct 31, 2017
4,333
Unknown
Please let this develop into something like the quasi-dead in Riddick.

More seriously and Jungian free, it'll be cool to see what comes of this.
 

Mivey

Member
Oct 25, 2017
17,819
The actual percentage of correctly answered questions is pretty low, so this still needs a lot more work, though it is remarkable that it seems to confirm lucid dreaming can be achieved by the participants very reliably.
 
Nov 8, 2017
3,532
This does not surprise me. My mind was blown when I discovered that lucid dreaming was a thing, and that I was able to train myself to do it in less than a week.
 

Chopchop

Member
Oct 25, 2017
14,171
Probably the first step towards some Futurama shit with in-dream ads.

Seriously though, that's super cool.
 

Ketch

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,287
think about how much work you could get done while sleeping.... for your employer