Sleepers send telegrams to scientists from their dreams as part of bizarre experiment

It has been thought that dreams are manifestations of a person's subconscious as the mind paints of picture of things we believe in while we sleep. Some people manage to remember their dreams but it isn't the same for everyone, and for a long time experts have tried to decode the hidden meaning behind dreams. In the latest attempt to understand dreams, researchers at Paller’s lab at Northwestern University in Illinois, along with peers in France, Germany, and the Netherlands, have independently demonstrated two-way communication with people as they are lucidly dreaming during Rapid Eye Movement or REM.

According to the research, a person dreams one to three times per week, however, not everyone can recall what they see in their sleep. According to a survey, people who say they never dream account for around 2.7% to 6.5% of the population, while those who have difficulty recalling dreams could do it when they were younger.

This fleeting nature of dreams has made it very tricky for scientists to visualize them as researchers do not have the ability to get into a person's mind as they dream. Therefore the only way to get data is to rely on the person's ability to recall the dream and narrate it. This is why it would be ideal to be able to communicate with people in their sleep, and while that may seem impossible, it can be done thanks to lucid dreamers.

Lucid dreamers are people who have the ability to remain aware of the dream during REM sleep, which is the sleeping phase where the brain is closer to the waking phase. Moreover, lucid dreamers can sometimes exercise partial control over the dream's narrative. They are able to make it go in the direction they want. These kinds of lucid dreams can occur spontaneously or can be mastered through training. 

This enabled an experiment where psychologist Keith Hearne and psychophysiologist Stephen Laberge proved that lucid dreamers were indeed asleep when they realized they were dreaming. The two researchers found lucid dreamers who agreed with them before they fell asleep to send a telegram from the dream. Today it is possible to combine such experiments with brain imaging techniques and study the brain regions involved in lucid dreaming. 

Now, in another experiment, researchers tried to communicate with the dreamers while they were dreaming and it was seen that they were able to respond using gestures such as smiling for "yes" and frowning for "no."

In the experiment conducted by Psypost, 18% of these participants were able to respond while they were dreaming. However, it's important to note that lucid dreaming still remains a rare phenomenon and even lucid dreamers are not lucid all the time throughout REM sleep.

This experiment paved the way for real-time conversation with sleepers, which offered the researchers the opportunity to explore the mysteries of dreams as they took shape. While the researchers were able to determine the composition of brain activity, there's still a long way to go for neuroscientists before they can truly understand how lucid dreams work.