A team of researchers has created an app that increases the frequency of lucid dreams. The key? Targeted sounds during REM sleep.
by Gianluca Riccio.
Have you ever woken up in the middle of a dream and realised you were dreaming? This experience, known as lucid dreaming, could become much more common thanks to a new app developed by researchers at Northwestern University.
The technology opens new frontiers in the study of consciousness during sleep, promising to triple the chances of lucid dreaming.
What are lucid dreams?
A lucid dream occurs when the dreamer becomes aware that he or she is dreaming while the dream is still in progress. This awareness can allow one to actively influence the content of the dream, transforming the dream experience into something more akin to a controllable virtual reality.
The ability to have lucid dreams is not common. On average, people report less than one lucid dream per week, and many have never had one.
How do you have lucid dreams? A good question. So good, in fact, that it has long fascinated researchers and dreamers alike.
Technological innovation
Researchers at Northwestern University have developed an app that uses an innovative approach to induce lucid dreams. The app allows users to listen to a specific sound before falling asleep, helping them to associate it with a state of awareness of their body and thoughts (this approach has been successfully tested in previous studies).
Six hours after falling asleep, during REM sleep, the app plays the same sound. This stimulus is designed to reactivate the dreamer’s consciousness and increase the likelihood of achieving lucidity during the dream.
Karen Konkoly, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University, points out: “Having one lucid dream a week is already a remarkable achievement.”
The study, published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition (link here), initially involved 19 participants who used the app for one week. The results were surprising: the average number of lucid dreams increased from 0.74 to 2.11 per week.
To verify that the increase was indeed due to the app’s sounds, the researchers conducted a second experiment with 112 people, using different control groups. The results confirmed that participants exposed to the ‘trained’ sounds were significantly more likely to have lucid dreams than the other groups. Seventeen per cent of participants achieved the goal on the first night, confirming that the sound-lucidity association is a key element of success.
Implications and future prospects
This may sound absurd to sceptics, I know. But the data speaks for itself: controlling your dreams is becoming a scientific reality.
This technology could make lucid dreaming accessible to a much wider audience. The applications are many: from consciousness research, to the treatment of nightmares, to creativity and personal development. The simplicity of the approach is particularly promising. Unlike laboratory sleep studies, which require sophisticated equipment and constant monitoring, this app can be used in the comfort of your own home.
The researchers suggest that this could be just the first of a new generation of technologies for the exploration and manipulation of the dream world.
