Dream hackers explore the frontiers of consciousness

A lucid dream is one in which you're aware of the fact that you're dreaming and can often control what happens. If you can train yourself in the practice, it can help boost creativity, confront fears, practice new skills, and even alleviate recurring nightmares, all while immersed in the vivid, limitless landscapes of your subconscious. Now, an array of new technologies and techniques are enabling researchers to help induce lucidity and even communicate with lucid dreamers while they're sleeping.

"Maintaining self-control in dreams is a bit of a learned skill," writes psychiatrist Michelle Carr, director of the Dream Engineering Lab at Montreal's Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine. "Similar to mindfulness, the dreamer must practice remaining both calm and focused while in an unpredictable and unstable dream. People can then learn to control dreams by using tricks of attention such as opening and closing their eyes and expecting, or even commanding, an object such as the Eiffel Tower to appear."

From her survey of the current research landscape (dreamscape?) published in Scientific American:

To be at once an actor in and director of a lucid dream requires delicate cognitive control and flexibility, but expert lucid dreamers—people who have lucid dreams at least weekly—would probably say "control" is not the most accurate term. It's more of an improvisation, a balancing act of guiding the dream toward desired content while allowing it to arise spontaneously—like a jazz musician suggesting a rhythm or melody but also listening and adjusting to what the other musicians are playing[…]

[One of Carr's PhD candidates Tobi Matzek] and other expert lucid dreamers sometimes ask big questions during their dreams. One night Matzek asked, "Can I experience the creation of the universe?" and she dreamed of being "immersed in outer space, surrounded by stars and planets and other huge celestial objects…. The darkness of space is deep and rich, and every planet and star is superbright." At one point she felt overwhelmed by the vastness, but a spiritual presence helped her stay calm. The end result, she says, was "absolutely breathtaking." She felt weightless and was "slowly spinning head over heels as I take in everything around me. Many [stars] are brown and red, and it's like they're all glowing. I know that I am actually seeing the universe uncreated, back in time." Understanding what's happening inside the brain during these altered states of consciousness could reveal how to induce such mystical experiences on demand.

Previously:
• Soon you may not even dream without people bothering you
• New study: People who are dreaming can have rational conversations with those who are awake
• Controlling your dreams for fun and science
• Virtual reality is effective training for lucid dreaming, according to scientific study
• Videogames train you for lucid dreaming?