When Christopher Mazurek realizes he’s dreaming, it’s always the small stuff that tips him off.
The first time it happened, Mazurek was a freshman at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. In the dream, he found himself in a campus dining hall. It was winter, but Mazurek wasn’t wearing his favorite coat.
“I realized that, OK, if I don’t have the coat, I must be dreaming,” Mazurek says. That epiphany rocked the dream like an earthquake. “Gravity shifted, and I was flung down a hallway that seemed to go on for miles,” he says. “My left arm disappeared, and then I woke up
Most people rarely if ever realize that they’re dreaming while it’s happening, what’s known as lucid dreaming. But some enthusiasts have cultivated techniques to become self-aware in their sleep and even wrest some control over their dream selves and settings. Mazurek, 24, says that he’s gotten better at molding his lucid dreams since that first whirlwind experience, sometimes taking them as opportunities to try flying or say hi to deceased family members.
Other lucid dreamers have used their personal virtual realities to plumb their subconscious minds for insights or feast on junk food without real-world consequences. But now, scientists have a new job for lucid dreamers: to explore their dreamscapes and report out in real time.
Dream research has traditionally relied on reports collected after someone wakes up. But people often wake with only spotty, distorted memories of what they dreamed. The dreamers can’t say exactly when events occurred, and they certainly can’t tailor their dreams to specific scientific studies.
The special thing about lucid dreaming is that you can get even closer to dream content and in a much more controlled and systematic fashion,” says Martin Dresler, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Donders Institute in Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Lucid dreamers who can perform assigned tasks and communicate with researchers during a dream open up tantalizing opportunities to study an otherwise untouchable realm. They are like the astronauts of the dream world, serving as envoys to the mysterious inner spaces created by slumbering minds.
So far, tests in very small groups of lucid dreamers suggest that the strange realities we visit in sleep may be experienced more like the real world than imagined ones. With more emissaries enlisted, researchers hope to probe how sleeping brains construct their elaborate, often bizarre plots and set pieces. Besides satisfying age-old curiosity, this work may point to new ways to treat nightmares. Lucid dream studies could also offer clues about how dreams contribute to creativity, regulating emotions or other cognitive jobs — helping solve the grand mystery of why we dream
But there are still a lot of problems to solve before lucid dreaming research can really take off. Chief among them is that very few dreamers can become lucid on demand in the lab. Those who can often struggle to do scientists’ bidding or communicate with the waking world. Pinpointing the best techniques to give more people more lucid dreams may assuage those issues. But even if it does, not all scientists agree on what lucid dreams can tell us about the far more common, nonlucid kind.
Are lucid dreams real
Tales of lucid dreams date back to antiquity. Aristotle may have been the first to mention them
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