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Lucid Dreamers Offer Clues to Consciousness

Lucid dreamers, people who can deliberately control their dreams during sleep, have long fascinated scientists. And now brain scans of those self-aware sleepers could offer insight into the seat of self-reflection in the mind.

It is difficult to get a full picture of what goes on in the brain when we make the transition from sleep to wakefulness. In fact, the specific areas of the brain underlying our restored self-perception and consciousness when we wake up have eluded scientists, according to a statement by the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry. But a team of researchers was able to get a picture of that isolated activity in lucid dreamers.

“In a normal dream, we have a very basal consciousness, we experience perceptions and emotions but we are not aware that we are only dreaming,” study researcher Martin Dresler, of Max Planck, said in a statement. “It’s only in a lucid dream that the dreamer gets a meta-insight into his or her state.”

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans, the team compared the activity of the brain during one of these lucid-dreaming periods with the activity just beforehand in a normal dream. Out of four participants, only two lucid-dreaming episodes could be verified as lucid dreams and were long enough to analyze with fMRI, which measures blood flow to brain regions in real time; an increase in blood flow to a specific region is a sign that region is becoming more active.

The results, detailed online July 1 in the journal Sleep, showed that a specific cortical network is activated when lucid consciousness is attained. Michael Czisch, another Max Planck researcher involved in the study, said activity in certain areas of the cerebral cortex spikes within seconds when a lucid state begins.

These regions include the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which has previously been associated with self-assessment, and the frontopolar regions, where the act of evaluating our own thoughts and feelings takes place, Czisch explained in a statement. “The precuneus is also especially active, a part of the brain that has long been linked with self-perception,” he said.

Previous research at the Max Planck Institute compared the brain activity of lucid dreamers as they entertained the same thoughts while awake and asleep. The brain activity was similar, if weaker during sleep, the researchers found.

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Near-Death Experiences are Lucid Dreams, Experiment Finds

In a new exercise by a California organization that studies lucid dreaming, volunteers have been conditioned to dream near-death experiences, including the classic scenario of flying toward a light at the end of a tunnel. The researchers say their experiment demonstrates that these heavenly visions must be products of the human mind rather than supernatural phenomena.

In the sleep experiment at the Out-Of-Body Experience Research Center in Los Angeles, four groups of 10 to 20 volunteers were trained to perform a series of mental steps upon awakening during the night that might lead them to have out-of-body experiences. If able to “separate” from their bodies, they were then conditioned to try dreaming about floating through a tunnel toward a bright light. Eighteen of the volunteers said they were able to dream such an experience.

“Some of the test subjects not only succeeded in reproducing the out-of-body flight through a tunnel, but also enjoyed the ecstasy typical of the experience, and even flew all the way to the light and met their deceased relatives there,” center leader Michael Raduga stated in a press release about the work, which has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More than 8 million Americans have had a near-death experience, and they most often occur during states of anesthesia-induced sleep, according to the center. Prior work by neurologists, including Kevin Nelson of the University of Kentucky, suggests that NDEs are indeed generated by the same brain mechanisms that cause lucid dreams. Nelson’s research shows that both types of experiences arise when part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal region — our “logical center,” which is usually active only when we’re awake — becomes active during REM sleep, allowing extremely vivid dreams that seem to be happening in real life. He calls the transitional state between dreaming and wakefulness a “borderland of consciousness” and believes it is in this mixed state that lucid dreams and NDEs occur.

With Nelson’s research in mind, Raduga designed his experiment to determine if volunteers could be coached to dream up NDEs when in the transitional phase between sleep and waking. This would demonstrate that reports of NDEs, which are commonly cited as proof of the supernatural, really are just lucid dreams.

Volunteers who successfully generated NDEs described their experiences for the researchers. One participant, identified by the center asNadezhda S., stated: “I was able to leave my body after a couple of tries. Now that I was out of my body, I wanted to see the tunnel and it immediately appeared in front of me … Once I flew to the end of that tunnel … I saw my deceased husband there in the spirit. We spoke for several minutes. His words, touch, bearing, and feelings were real, just like during his life. Later on, when I felt it was time to leave, I went up to the tunnel, jumped and gently landed in my body.”

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Science Back In Lucid Dreaming

Photo: “Paul McCartney - Dream” by Amy Lehrman

The contents of a person’s dream have been revealed by brain scan for the first time, scientists report in the Nov. 8 Current Biology. By monitoring the brain of a man who has unusual control over his dreaming, the accomplishment brings researchers closer to understanding how the brain spins its nightly yarns.

“It’s really exciting that people have done this,” says sleep researcher Edward Pace-Schott at Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “And it also brings back lucid dreaming as a very powerful scientific tool.”

Lucid dreaming is the rare ability to direct behaviors while in a deep sleep. By all objective measures, the person is dead to the world: Most muscles are paralyzed and the eyes are doing the quick jitters that characterize REM, the main dreaming phase of sleep. But at the same time, the lucid dreamer knows that he is dreaming and can control the scenes, says study coauthor Michael Czisch of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. “The world is open to do everything.”

Czisch and his team set out to catch a lucid dreamer’s brain activity with an fMRI machine. Instead of creating complex fantasias of flying over the Alps, scaling buildings or slaying dragons, six experienced lucid dreamers were asked to squeeze their left hands and then their right hands repeatedly in a dream. “It’s a rather easy thing to do,” Czisch says. “If it’s a random dream, things would be much more complicated.”

Full Article: Feat opens the door to probing the stuff of nocturnal dramas

(via ikenbot)