Scientists have been able to communicate with sleepers – and vice versa. This allowed the dreamers to solve simple math problems and answer simple yes / no questions.
A team of scientists from the Netherlands, the United States, Germany and France managed to break into the dreams of the sleepers and communicate with them. More specifically, they did this with 36 tested people who were in a lucid dream – a dream in which the dreamer realizes that he is dreaming.
Connect with the outside world
Scientists asked simple questions that the sleepers answered whether or not they moved their eyes or faces in a certain way.
Since the 1980s, we have known that conscious dreamers can communicate from dreams through these signals (Eye and face movements, ed.This is what Northwestern University lead author Karen Concolly told NPR. What this team wanted to discover, however, was whether dreamers could also receive and respond to information while dreaming.
Yes, it turns out. Of the 158 attempts, lucid dreamers were able to give correct answers in 18 percent of the cases – enough, according to the researchers, to demonstrate that mutual communication is possible during REM sleep.
In another 18 percent it was not clear whether the participants answered effectively or not, and in 3 percent of cases an incorrect answer was provided. In 61% of cases, participants did not respond at all.
‘At present’
A typical calculation provided by the researchers was: “What is 8 – 6?” For example, a dreaming 19-year-old American was able to answer this question by moving his eyes from left to right twice to indicate the number “2”. When they asked him the question again, he gave the same answer with his own eyes.
According to the neuroscientist Martin Dressler of Radboud University in Nijmegen, where the Dutch part of the study was conducted, such a study is important to find out exactly what we are dreaming about. Now we ask for that after that. But then you are actually asking for a memory, which is unreliable De Volkskrant. “Ultimately you want to hear in real time what the dreamers experience.”
(MAh)
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