Kip and communicate? Yes you can

Scientists at sleep laboratories say they have communicated with people who are dreaming.

Scientists say they have been able to communicate with people while they are asleep.

Scientists at sleep laboratories in the US and Europe say they have communicated with people who are dreaming, asking questions to slumbering patients who gave correct answers by twitching or moving their eyes.

The studies, conducted in Chicago, Paris, two German laboratories and Nijmegen in The Netherlands, were akin to “finding a way to talk with an astronaut who is on another world”, the researchers said in a paper published in Current Biology.

Their successes “refute the common belief that it is pointless to try to communicate with people who are asleep”, they said.

Inquiries about dreams often rely on interviews of dreamers woken from sleep, whose memories of a dream can be fragmentary and unreliable. Communi­cating with people still asleep “such that they could describe their experiences while in the midst of a dream would greatly expand the possibilities for scientifically exploring dream experiences”, the researchers say.

The studies took different ­approaches to the same problem of reaching people who are “lucid dreaming” — a state in which the dreamer becomes conscious that they are dreaming.

“We have been working on it for about five years,” said Ken Paller, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University in Chicago, who began studying sleep while examining how memories are formed and stored in the brain.

In Chicago the scientists ­developed a method to train people to recognise when they were dreaming. Once in REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, a computer would play a voice command, soft enough not to wake them, asking them to check if they were dreaming. “The body is paralysed but your eyes are moving,” Professor Paller said.

In 158 efforts to communicate with 36 people who were asleep and dreaming, researchers got a correct response on 18.4 per cent of occasions.

The researchers want the study to drive new investigations of dreams and allow for creative and therapeutic applications.

The Times