Dream a little dream of me

In one of my favorite novels, The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin, the main character -- an unassuming man named George Orr -- figures out that when he dreams, his dream changes reality.  The problem is, since when the change occurs, it alters everyone else's memories of what had happened, the only one who realizes that anything has changed is him.

At first, of course, he doesn't believe it.  He must be remembering wrong.  Then, when he becomes convinced it's actually happening, he starts taking drugs to try to stop him from dreaming, but they don't work.  As a last resort, he tries to get help from a psychologist...

... but the psychologist realizes how powerful this ability could be, and starts guiding George into dreams that will shape the world into what he wants it to be.

It's a powerful cautionary tale about what happens when an unscrupulous person gains control over someone with a valuable talent.  Power corrupts, as the oft-quoted line from John Dalberg-Acton goes, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I couldn't help thinking about The Lathe of Heaven when I read about some new exploration of lucid dreaming taking place at REMSpace, a California startup, that will be featured in a paper in The International Journal of Dream Research soon (a preprint is available at the link provided).  A lucid dream is one in which you are aware that you're dreaming while you're dreaming, and often have some degree of control over what happens.  Around twenty percent of people report regular lucid dreaming, but there is some research that suggests many of us can learn to lucid dream.

Dickens's Dream by Robert W. Buss (1875) [Image is in the Public Domain]

At this point, I'll interject that despite a long history of very vivid dreams, I've never had a lucid dream.  I did have an almost-lucid dream, once; it was a weird and involved story about being a groomsman in a wedding in a big cathedral, and when the priest said the whole "does anyone have any objections?" thing, a gaudily-dressed old lady in the front row stood up and started shouting about what an asshole the groom was and how the bride could do way better.  And I'm standing there, feeling horrified and uncomfortable, and I thought, "This is bizarre!  How could this be happening?  Is this a dream?"  So I kind of looked around, then patted myself to reassure myself that I was solid, and thought, "Nope.  I guess this is real."

So the one time I actually considered the question of whether I was dreaming, I got the wrong answer.

But I digress.

Anyhow, the researchers at REMSpace took a group of test subjects who all reported being able to lucid dream, and hooked them up to electromyography and electroencephalography sensors -- which, respectively, measure the electrical discharge from voluntary muscle contractions and neural firing in the brain -- and gave them the pre-sleep suggestion that they would dream about driving a car.  Using the output from the sensors, they created a virtual avatar of the person on a computer screen, and found that they were able to use tiny motions of their hands to steer it, and even avoid obstacles.

"Two-way interaction with a computer from dreams opens up a whole area of new technologies," said Michael Raduga, who led the experiment.  "Now, these developments are crude, but soon they will change the idea of human capabilities."

Maybe so, but it also puts the dreamer in the hands of the experimenter.  Now, I'm not saying Michael Raduga and his team are up to anything nefarious; and obviously I don't believe anyone's got the George-Orr-like ability to change reality to conform to what they dream.  But does anyone else have the feeling that "two-way interaction" into your dreams is potentially problematic?  I've heard a lot of people say things like, "hypnosis isn't dangerous, you can't be given a post-hypnotic suggestion that induces you to do something you wouldn't ordinarily do," but if there's one thing my knowledge of neuroscience has taught me, it's that the human brain is highly suggestible.

So as interested as I am in lucid dreaming, I'm not ready to sign up to have my dreams interacted with by a computer controlled by someone else.  And I hope like hell that when Raduga and his group at REMSpace start "changing the idea of human capabilities," they are extremely careful.

Anyway, that's our interesting-but-a-little-scary research for today.  Me, I'm gonna stick with my ordinary old dreams, which are peculiar enough.  And given my failure at detecting a potentially lucid dream when I had the chance, I doubt I'd be all that good at it in any case.  I'd probably drive my virtual dream car right into a telephone pole.

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Living the dream

A lucid dream occurs when you are aware you're dreaming while you're dreaming -- and (apparently) with practice, you can learn to control what happens.

Which sounds kind of awesome, but I've never had one.

I came close one time.  A while back I had a dream of being in a wedding party in a big old cathedral -- vaulted ceilings, stained glass, huge pipe organ, the works.  I don't recall recognizing the bride and groom, or (in fact) any of the other people present, but anyhow, there I was with other formally-dressed people, flanking the happy couple as they recited their vows.

When the priest got to the "if anyone objects to this marriage" bit, that's when things got weird.  An old lady in the front row stood up and said, "I object!" in a really nasal, grating voice.  She then began a recitation of how awful the bride and groom were, how she couldn't stand either of them, and how she was only there to let 'em both have it.  (You'd think, if both the bride and groom were horrible people, it'd be better to let them marry each other than to potentially ruin the lives of two other people, but apparently the old lady didn't see it that way.)

So I'm watching all this, aghast, and I had this sudden thought.  "This is so weird.  When does this ever happen in real life?  I must be dreaming."

I looked around, assessing the surroundings, and then kind of poked myself in the chest with my finger, and thought, "Huh.  I guess it's real after all.  How strange."

Doesn't it just figure?  I have my one and only opportunity to lucid dream, and when the time came to figure out if I was dreaming, I got the wrong answer.

Dickens's Dream by Robert Buss (1875) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The subject comes up because of a study led by Karen Konkoly, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, which describes research done into people having lucid dreams -- and the potential for communicating with dreamers and having them answer questions or even follow simple commands.

The authors write:

Dreams take us to a different reality, a hallucinatory world that feels as real as any waking experience.  These often-bizarre episodes are emblematic of human sleep but have yet to be adequately explained.  Retrospective dream reports are subject to distortion and forgetting, presenting a fundamental challenge for neuroscientific studies of dreaming.  Here we show that individuals who are asleep and in the midst of a lucid dream (aware of the fact that they are currently dreaming) can perceive questions from an experimenter and provide answers using electrophysiological signals.  We implemented our procedures for two-way communication during polysomnographically verified rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep in 36 individuals.  Some had minimal prior experience with lucid dreaming, others were frequent lucid dreamers, and one was a patient with narcolepsy who had frequent lucid dreams.  During REM sleep, these individuals exhibited various capabilities, including performing veridical perceptual analysis of novel information, maintaining information in working memory, computing simple answers, and expressing volitional replies.  Their responses included distinctive eye movements and selective facial muscle contractions, constituting correctly answered questions on 29 occasions across 6 of the individuals tested.  These repeated observations of interactive dreaming, documented by four independent laboratory groups, demonstrate that phenomenological and cognitive characteristics of dreaming can be interrogated in real time.  This relatively unexplored communication channel can enable a variety of practical applications and a new strategy for the empirical exploration of dreams.

It's a cool finding, but not that surprising when you think about it.  A lot of us have had experiences where outside (i.e. real) sounds have become incorporated into our dreams.  My wife once had a dream of hearing NPR, but when she checked, it wasn't coming from our stereo speakers.  So she wandered around the house, and finally found that it was coming from the microwave.  But unplugging the microwave still didn't shut off the news broadcast, and she proceeded to go from appliance to appliance, trying to figure out why our house had the ghostly voices of Doualy Xaykaothao and Ofebia Quist-Arcton and Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson coming out of nowhere.

Then she woke up, and found that her clock radio was on, and the news broadcast had become incorporated into her dream state.

Which, of course, brings up another, and more pressing question: why do NPR reporters have such awesome names?  I don't know anyone in real life who has a name as cool as Kai Ryssdal, Nedda Ulaby, and David Folkenflik.  I wonder if it's a condition of employment?

NPR interviewer: I'm happy to see that you've applied for a job as a reporter here at NPR.  What's your name?

Me:  Gordon Bonnet.

NPR interviewer:  Oh, I'm sorry, that's not nearly cool enough.  Maybe you should see if MSNBC has any openings.

But I digress.

The lucid dreaming experiment definitely is cool, but it does open up some rather scary potential.  One of my favorite novels is Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven, which involves a man named George Orr who not only has lucid dreams, his dreams change reality.  If he dreams that there was a plague five years ago that wiped out half the world's population, when he wakes up, that's what's happened.  The problem is, no one realizes the change but him.  When the past changed, everyone's memory changed as well, so George is the only person who recognizes that things are different.  Of course, any psychologist he tries to tell this is going to think he's crazy; the psychologist's memory changed along with everyone else's.  But one psychologist believes him -- and realizes that he can use George's peculiar power to reshape the world as he sees fit, by giving George suggestions while he's sleeping.

After that, things go downhill fast.

While the dream-changing-reality ability in LeGuin's incredibly inventive story isn't real, you have to wonder if other things might be.  Could a suggestion during a lucid dream change your memories, or create a memory of something that never happened?  Could it be used to overcome psychological issues like phobias -- or induce aversions where there were none previously?  Any time I hear about people trying to tap into the subconscious mind, it always gives me pause -- because being subconscious, we would very likely be at the mercy of whoever is controlling the experiment, just like the unfortunate George Orr in The Lathe of Heaven.

In any case, it's a compelling study about a topic I've always found fascinating.  As Konkoly et al. point out, we still don't know why people -- and apparently, other animals -- dream, but its ubiquity suggests that it serves some important purpose.  Not only that, we know that blocking REM sleep fairly quickly leads to hallucinations and psychotic symptoms, so whatever dreaming is doing for us, it's evidently critical for our mental health.

The Konkoly et al. study is only a first foray into this topic, so I'll be looking for more research springboarding off their findings.  I'm wondering if it might be possible for people who don't lucid dream to learn how.  I've seen advertisements for devices that are supposed to clue in the sleeper that (s)he is dreaming, and allow for learning how to control the internal dream state -- one I recall is a headband with an LED that activates when you go into REM -- but I haven't seen any particularly convincing evidence that they work.  It'd be cool if they did, though.  I'd love to learn to lucid dream.  Think of the fun you could have!  To start with, I could have told the old lady in the cathedral to shut up and sit down.  That'd have been nice, at least as a start.

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 Many of us were riveted to the screen last week watching the successful landing of the Mars Rover Perseverance, and it brought to mind the potential for sending a human team to investigate the Red Planet.  The obstacles to overcome are huge; the four-odd-year voyage there and back, requiring a means for producing food, and purifying air and water, that has to be damn near failsafe.

Consider what befell the unfortunate astronaut Mark Watney in the book and movie The Martian, and you'll get an idea of what the crew could face.

Physicist and writer Kate Greene was among a group of people who agreed to participate in a simulation of the experience, not of getting to Mars but of being there.  In a geodesic dome on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, Greene and her crewmates stayed for four months in isolation -- dealing with all the problems Martian visitors would run into, not only the aforementioned problems with food, water, and air, but the isolation.  (Let's just say that over that time she got to know the other people in the simulation really well.)

In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth, Greene recounts her experience in the simulation, and tells us what the first manned mission to Mars might really be like.  It makes for wonderful reading -- especially for people like me, who are just fine staying here in comfort on Earth, but are really curious about the experience of living on another world.

If you're an astronomy buff, or just like a great book about someone's real and extraordinary experiences, pick up a copy of Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars.  You won't regret it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Perchance to dream

New from the "They Made A Movie Out of This and It Didn't End Well," we have: some researchers at MIT who are trying to figure out how to hack into, and control, your dreams.

The world of dreams is so strange and vivid that the idea of selecting or controlling dream content has been the subject of fiction for a very long time.  Ursula LeGuin's brilliant novel The Lathe of Heaven is about the intersection between dreaming and reality -- and about a disturbed young man's discovery that the content of his dreams is altering everyone's reality.

The problem is, because everyone changes simultaneously, so do their memories -- meaning the only one who realizes what's going on is the young man himself.  And when he convinces his psychologist that he's telling the truth, the psychologist decides to use that ability for his own malign purposes.

Introducing a frightening ethical issue into the whole thing.

It's popped up over and over again.  Star Trek: The Next Generation dealt with the necessity of dreams, and what might happen if we're deprived of REM sleep, in the episode "Night Terrors" -- which has the scene which in my opinion is the single scariest moment in the whole series, when Dr. Crusher is wandering through the makeshift morgue trying to figure out why an entire starship's crew died violent deaths at each other's hands, and she turns around -- and the corpses, still shrouded in their sheets, are all sitting up.

Not to be outdone, The X Files did an episode about controlling dreams -- and how that could be used to alter someone's personality and intentions -- in the episode "Amor Fati," wherein the evil Cigarette-Smoking Man has Fox Mulder so sunk in a realistic dream that Dana Scully has to enter the dream to rescue him by convincing him it's all an illusion.

Perhaps most famously, the movie Inception looks at the possibility of hacking into someone's dreams and placing a subconscious suggestion in the dreamer's mind -- without, of course, his own permission.  This is a lot closer to what the MIT scientists are doing (more on that in a moment), leading to ethical issues that are a bit more likely than the ones in Lathe to stare us in the face.

So this obsession with dreams has come up again and again in fiction, and no wonder.  The content of dreams is wild, and for most of us, uncontrollable.  There's the estimated one percent of us who regularly lucid dream -- they're aware during dreams that they're dreaming, and can learn to control the content -- but most of us, myself included, can't do that.

But now, some researchers at MIT are trying to change all of that.

In the MIT "Dream Lab," scientists have developed a device call Dormio -- it's a form-fitted glove that detects when you're slipping into sleep, and injects an audio cue to insert some image or another into your dream state.  In one trial, the word was "tiger" -- and an impressive number of the test subjects reported that their dreams involved tigers.

Of course, this is just the first step toward broadening our reach into the dream world.  "People don’t know that a third of their life is a third where they could change or structure or better themselves," said Dream Lab researcher Adam Horowitz.  "Whether you’re talking about memory augmentation or creativity augmentation or improving mood the next day or improving test performance, there’s all these things you can do at night that are practically important."

Another Dream Lab researcher, Judith Amores, is trying a different route into the dreaming subconscious -- through the sense of smell.  Long known to have intimate ties into memory, the sense of smell might be a way to jump into the dream world without using an audio cue (which for light sleepers, might simply wake them up).  "The sense of smell is particularly interesting because it’s directly connected to the memory and the emotional parts of the brain — the amygdala and the hippocampus," Amores said.  "And that’s a very interesting gateway to access well-being."

All of it opens up a vast array of possibilities not only for research, but for psychological healing.  A dream-based approach to treating PTSD, for example, has very real potential.  Since one of the functions of REM sleep seems to be memory consolidation, there could also be applications to improving learning capacity and retention of information.  But beyond that, there's just the capacity for it to be pure fun.

"It’s such an exhilarating feeling to lucid dream," Tore Nielsen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Montreal, said in an MIT blog post.  "You can try flying, singing, having sex — it’s better than VR."

On one hand, I'm not sure we need something else that allows people to hide from reality.  On the other, if I had a device I could wear that allowed me to control my dreams, I'd do it every night.

Think of the fun you could have with self-controlled no-repercussions full-body-sensurround fantasies every night.  I think a lot of us might not want to wake up.

Which brings up a whole other set of problems.

In any case, the researchers in the Dream Lab and other similar projects are looking at this as a way to connect to unused potential, not as a way of controlling people, which is the right approach.  "This is less like, 'I’m going to map something so I control it,' and more like, 'I’m going to give you a looking glass, and you do with that what you will,'" Horowitz said.  "I have very little interest in creating tools that take people further from themselves.  That’s definitely not the hope."

Or, as Ruben Naiman of the University of Arizona's Center for Integrative Medicine put it, "The thing with hacking dreams is that it’s based on a presumption that the subconscious is unintelligent, that it doesn’t have a life.  The unconscious, it’s another kind of intelligence.  We can learn from it. We can be in dialogue with it rather than dominate it, rather than ‘tap in’ and try to steer it in directions we want."

So all of this is pretty exciting, and I still wouldn't hesitate to volunteer to try out whatever they come up with.  But if I put that glove on and end up getting the audio clue, "Corpses in a morgue sitting up," I am right the fuck outta there.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is an important read for any of you who, like me, (1) like running, cycling, and weight lifting, and (2) have had repeated injuries.

Christie Aschwanden's new book Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery goes through all the recommendations -- good and bad, sensible and bizarre -- that world-class athletes have made to help us less-elite types recover from the injuries we incur.  As you might expect, some of them work, and some of them are worse than useless -- and Aschwanden will help you to sort the wheat from the chaff.

The fun part of this is that Aschwanden not only looked at the serious scientific research, she tried some of these "cures" on herself.  You'll find out the results, described in detail brought to life by her lucid writing, and maybe it'll help you find some good ways of handling your own aches and pains -- and avoid the ones that are worthless.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Dream weavers

All my life, I've been plagued with vivid dreams.  I use the word "plagued" deliberately, because more often than not my dreams are disturbing, chaotic, and odd, leaving me unsettled upon waking.  I remember more than once thrashing about so violently during a dream that I've found myself in the morning on the floor in a heap of blankets; I've also had the residuum of unease from a bad dream stay with me through much of the following day.  And given that I've also spent most of my adult life fighting chronic insomnia, it's a wonder I get any sleep at all.

Of course, I've also had good dreams.  A series of flying dreams I had as a child were so realistic, and so cool, that for a while I was convinced that they were true; that I could go into my parents' front yard, angle my body to the wind, and be caught up and thrown into the air like a kite.  I've had dreams of running effortlessly, dreams of winning the lottery, and the inevitable (but admittedly pleasant) dreams of the non-PG-13-rated variety.

Through it all, though, I've never had a lucid dream.  Lucid dreams are dreams in which you are aware you're dreaming -- and apparently, with some people, dreams in which you are able to control what happens.  If such a thing were commonplace, who would need virtual reality or computer games, when every night you could create your own reality and then interact with it as if it were real?

The first step toward making such a thing possible for ordinary schmoes like myself, who dream frequently but never lucidly, may just have hit the market.  Called "Remee," the product looks like a sleep mask, but on the inside of the mask are six red LED lights.  Even with your eyelids closed, your eyes receive enough light to remain aware of your surroundings, and when the lights activate -- late in the sleep cycle, when you are most likely to be in REM (Rapid Eye Movement, the stage of sleep in which you dream) -- your brain becomes aware of them.  At that point (so the theory goes), your perception of the red lights becomes a signal, alerting you to the fact that you're dreaming.  From there, the lucid dream is initiated.

So, the lights act a little like the totem objects in Inception -- giving you an anchor, something that clues you in with regards to what is going on.  But unlike the totem objects, whose purpose was to check to see if you were dreaming so you could get out, if need be, here the purpose is to let you know that the fun is about to begin.

The inventors of Remee, Duncan Frazier and Steven McGuigan, told The Daily Mail (read the story here) that their tests have indicated that the lights are unlikely to cause seizures or any other ill effects.  If they fire during non-REM sleep, for example, the brain simply ignores them -- as it does if a faint light (say the distant headlights of a car) shine briefly into your bedroom window at night.

Remee masks are priced at $95 each, and are available here.  Frazier and McGuigan report that since Remee masks first came on the market, they've received over 7,000 orders.

Me, I find this intriguing, but I do wonder about what long-term (possibly psychological) effects such a thing might have, as we still don't have much of an idea what dreaming actually does.  That dreams are important seems obvious, given their ubiquity amongst mammal species -- both of my dogs clearly dream, apparently about chasing squirrels judging by how their feet move and the little muffled woofing noises they make.  Features that are widespread amongst many different, distantly-related species are called evolutionarily conserved features, and the usual interpretation is that they have been maintained through evolutionary history because they serve some sort of essential purpose.  As such, you have to question the wisdom of monkeying around with something like dreaming until we know more about it.

Be that as it may, if I had a Remee mask, I'd definitely try it.  Whatever harm it might do, I would guess, is unlikely to happen from occasional use.  And if you decide to get one, do let me know by posting here what your results are.  Given the unsettling nature of many of my nightly forays into the dream world, it might be nice to have a strategy for taking charge and having a little fun.