Artificially Inducing Lucid Dreaming

Published in

Neurotech@Davis

6 min readJan 18, 2024

Your wildest dreams just got wilder. Welcome to the world of lucid dreaming, where the line between imagination and reality blurs. New advancements in neuroscience research help us unravel the secrets behind lucid dreaming and the fascinating relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind.

What is lucid dreaming?

A lucid dream is a type of dream wherein a person can experience consciousness in the form of a dream-like vision while still asleep. Lucid dreamers have reported having the ability to control their actions and surroundings and essentially maintain free will within their dream setting. However, little is known about what causes lucid dreaming and why some are more capable of experiencing it than others.

A study conducted by scientists in Frankfurt University suggests that it is possible to train someone to become more likely to experience lucid dreaming when they fall asleep¹. In order to understand how lucid dreaming works, scientists trained six student volunteers to strive for spontaneous lucidity, a state where a person comes to the realization that they are dreaming while asleep and their dream becomes lucid. 20 undergraduate students at Bonn University took part in weekly lucidity training workshops, and the six participants of this study claimed to experience lucid dreaming at least three times a week after four months of attending workshops. The team studied each of the six subjects while they slept, collecting data regarding brain activity and monitoring eye movements through an EEG, and instructed the subjects to perform a set of repetitive but deliberate eye movements to signal that they had achieved lucidity. However, inducing lucidity proved to be difficult. Instead, the subjects succeeded in lucid dreaming through pre-sleep autosuggestion, which consisted of subjects telling themselves to recognize fantastical or unrealistic events as dreams before going to sleep. Fascinatingly, the subjects were able to signal to the researchers when they had achieved lucid dreaming by making voluntary eye movements that they had previously been taught¹.

Figure 1 shows brain activity throughout sleep of the subjects in the form of recorded eye movement signals (EOG) and electromyographic activity (EMG)¹. Subjects were first asked to perform a specific set of eye movements with the pattern left-right-left, moving their pupils back and forth several times with their eyes closed and before sleeping. The blue peaks show the eyes moving to the left, while the red peaks show the eyes moving to the right. Although less pronounced, the same peaks are observed in the graph corresponding to a lucid dreaming state, showing that subjects were conscious enough to respond to external stimuli while lucid.

Figure 1: Graphs of eye movement signals (EOG) and electromyographic activity (EMG) measured over time for each of three sleep cycles: waking with eyes closed (WEC), active lucid dreaming, and REM sleep¹

In comparison to normal REM sleep, subjects had more pronounced and obvious eye movements when lucid dreaming, while muscle relaxation was proven to be common to both states. Figure 2 shows that overall, the prefrontal cortex was shown to be much more active during lucidity, suggesting that lucid dreaming is a hybrid state between a waking and REM sleep state¹.

Figure 2: γ-40 Hz activity displayed topographically of subjects during three sleep cycles: waking with eyes closed (WEC), active lucid dreaming, and REM sleep¹

Can lucid dreaming be artificially induced?

The successful use of pre-sleep autosuggestion shows that it is possible for a person to provoke lucid dreaming on their own, but is it possible to artificially induce lucidity in a subject who has never experienced it before? During non-lucid dreaming, the whole brain is active at some level, but the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for critical thinking and decision making, is less active than while awake³. This is particularly true during REM sleep, which explains why we are typically unable to recognize the implausibility of fantastical or unrealistic events in dreams. However, this is not consistent with lucid dreamers. Recent studies have shown that increased brain activity in the prefrontal cortex may be responsible for lucid dreams. Neuroscientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry compared brain structures of frequent lucid dreamers and those who have never experienced a lucid dream². They found that lucid dreamers had a significantly larger and more developed frontal lobe, suggesting that lucid dreaming and metacognition are closely related.

Another study conducted in Heidelberg University delves deeper into the role of the prefrontal cortex during lucid dreaming⁴. More specifically, this team attempted to induce lucid dreaming without the subject’s effort by stimulating the pre-frontal cortex. While the subjects were asleep, the researchers exposed them to transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), a non-invasive method of stimulating specific areas of the brain using an electrical current in order to establish brain-behavior relationships. After comparing the control and experimental trials, the results show that subjects dreamed for longer when undergoing tDCS, and were more likely to experience lucidity⁴. Although this clearly shows the link between activity in the pre-frontal cortex and lucid dreaming, the study was not entirely conclusive, as effects were not as strong in subjects who rarely lucid dreamt before the study.

Are lucid dreamers conscious?

As the sleeper treads the thin line between consciousness and unconsciousness, we wonder to what extent is a lucid dreamer actually awake? A study from Northwestern University investigated whether lucid dreamers would be conscious enough to respond to outside stimuli the same way they would if awake⁵. Using EEG and EMG methods to record eye movements, facial contractions, and brain activity, the team monitored the response of subjects when exposed to various stimuli. One stimulus was asking the subjects to solve simple arithmetic problems such as 8 minus 6 or 4 minus 0 either by verbally asking the question or by flashing lights to communicate the problems in Morse Code. Subjects were also asked simple yes/no questions about themselves such as “do you like chocolate?” They would then respond using pre-determined eye movements that corresponded to an affirmative or negative answer. In every case, subjects were overwhelmingly successful in using these deliberate eye movements to answer questions.

One participant of the study reported that he found himself in a hospital-like environment and saw the lights flickering “4 plus 0” in Morse code, which he recognized as an external stimulus and responded “4” using eye movements. Then, he found a bowl of water that flashed (in the way a fish tank light might) but reported that the signal was too fast for him to decode. He was, however, able to identify that he was being shown math problems.

Overall, the results strongly support the idea that lucid dreamers are, in fact, conscious to an extent while sleeping and can perceive and even respond to external stimuli⁵. Another surprising conclusion the study supports is the possibility of sleep learning, as subjects were able to recall new information they were exposed to while lucid dreaming. By utilizing the power of suggestivity with specific external stimuli, we can manipulate a lucid dreamer’s perception on reality.

As we strive to understand the brain, it becomes clear that our dreams are not just visions we see in our sleep, but windows into the extraordinary potential of the human mind. We are getting closer to the possibility of controlling and utilizing our sleep to see our wishes come true, expanding our creativity, and discovering what our brains are truly capable of. While asleep, you might be able to hone a skill, learn a language, or get some last-minute studying in for that final. The boundaries of your dreams are only as limited as the borders of your imagination. Sweet dreams.

References

Artificially Inducing Lucid Dreaming

Written by Shamita Bhattacharjee