Have you ever wished you could control your dreams? Lucid dreams are a known phenomenon in which a sleeping person is aware that they are dreaming, and can actually control their dream.
While some people have the natural ability to experience lucid dreams on a regular basis, most of us can only dream of this ability. Nevertheless, recent discoveries indicate that we are very close to the day when technological developments will allow all of us to experience lucid dreams.
Lucid dreams
A lucid dream is one in which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming. During lucid dreaming, the dreamer may have some control over the dream's characters, narrative, and environment.
Early references to the phenomenon are found in ancient Greek. Aristotle wrote: "often when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream".
If dreaming in general is considered to be an unsolved scientific mystery, lucid dreaming is a mystery within a mystery – nobody knows exactly why it happens and how it influences the dreamer.
Within the last several years, technological developments such as fMRI and EEG have helped researches to make some interesting discoveries in this field, and it seems that we are standing on the verge of a game changing breakthrough.
So what do we know so far?
Lucid dreams are much more common than it seems. A German study from 2011 found that about 51% of people have experienced a lucid dream at least once. Like most other sleep phenomena and disorders, it usually begins during childhood or adolescence.
In 2012, a study objectively proved lucid dreaming exists for the first time. For the study, scientists asked the participants who claim to have lucid dreams ability to clench their fists while they were awake, and measured their brain activity using an fMRI. After that, the participants were asked to fall asleep and to dream about clenching their fists. The study showed that similar areas of the brain were active in both cases.
But the greatest discovery so far came from a German study conducted in 2014, using a technique called “transcranial alternating current stimulation” (tACS). The researchers used electrodes that send a very weak, low-frequency electrical signal across the brain of sleeping volunteers.
The volunteers were tested at different frequencies. When they were stimulated with 25 HZ frequency, they reported “an increased ratings for control of the dream plot”. In other words - for the first time a technology device actually gave people the ability to have lucid!
The rise of lucid dream technology
While the research of lucid dreams is still in a very preliminary stage, entrepreneurs are already starting to understand its potential and several startups claim that they can actually provide people with the ability to have lucid dreams via technology. All of them are based pretty much in the same concept.
In 2014, a kickstarter campaign called Aurora Dreamband presented a concept of a special headband that you can wear while sleeping. The headband tracks your brain waves, and when it detects that you've reachedREM sleep, it gives audiovisual cues, such as a flashing light, to help the user recognize they are in a dream state.
iBand+ and Lucid Dreamer are very similar products. Both claim to be able to measure brain activity by using EEG in order to determine when the user is entering a dreaming state, and then send some kind of a cue so that they can became aware of it.
InstaDreamer is a very recent kickstarter campaign. Unlike Aurora Dreamband and iBand+, this product comes in the form of a bracelet that the user wears over their hand while sleeping. The bracelet will monitor several body parameters like temperature, pulse and movements, and will send a small vibration that will launch you into a lucid dream just when the time is right.
It’s still not clear how effective these products are. Most of them are brand new and haven’t even been delivered to the clients yet. Nonetheless, there is clearly a growing interest in this domain that will probably keep growing.
The royal road to the unconscious
The most significant implementation of this kind of a technology is in the domain of psychotherapy. Dreams are known to be the best way to submerge into our subconscious, or in Sigmund Freud's words: “Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.” Controlling our dreams and not less importantly – remembering them, could help all of us understand ourselves better and become more aware.
Lucid dreaming could also be a great tool for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It’s a known fact the people who suffer from PTSD often re-experience their trauma within nightmares. With lucid dreaming ability, they may be able to let go of their fears by realizing the absence of real threats within the dream, trying to wake up during a nightmare or even trying to change the dream's context, in a way of transforming the nightmare into a neutral or even a pleasant dream.
A study from 2015 found that patients that were given a lucid dreaming training reported a concurrent decrease in nightmare frequency. This means that there is a good chance that in the future we cloud actually use lucid dreams to eliminate nightmares, or at least reduce their frequency.
A dream market
Beside psychotherapy, the lucid dreams technology has an enormous entertainment potential. The average person spends around 2 hours per night dreaming - this adds up to 6 years in an average lifetime that could be translated into pure fun.
Just think about it: everything is possible in a dream. No virtual reality could generate such a profound and powerful experience. From flying to Mars to beating Hitler – everything is possible within a dream, as long as you can control it.
But there are even crazier options for this futuristic technology. Recent research had successfully demonstrated a computer's ability to read a person's mind by using fMRI, and generating an illustrated image of what the person is perceiving. The results are very basic and preliminary, yet still very impressive.
As our brain perceives data the same way during sleep and during waking hours, in the future we might actually be able to document our dreams and watch them later as a short film. We might even be able to share a dream we've had via social media.
How safe it is?
Is lucid dreaming dangerous? The truth is that we simply don’t know. Because of the fact that there is so much that we don’t understand about dreams and their function, it’s hard to predict the influence of lucid dreams.
Most people that experienced lucid dreaming reported a good experience and there’s no evidence that lucid dreaming can bring on mental illness. Nevertheless, we have never had the technology that could give everyone the ability to have lucid dreams. We might just discover that some people simply should have this ability.
There are so many potential problems that could emerge from such a technology: some people could get addicted to it and maybe lose their will to live their conscious life. Others could have all sorts of psychotic disorders that will cause them to lose the ability to distinguish between real life and dream. Eventually, this ability might turn out to be so problematic that it will be made illegal like some types of drugs.
In conclusion
If there is something that we haven’t conquered yet – it’s our dreams. Controlling our dreams is an old dream that will come true someday. We just have to hope that it won’t turn out to be a nightmare.