A phone app could help people have lucid dreams

Within the event it's good to have a dream where you’re dreaming, you would perchance perchance be in success. A phone app seems to raise users’ odds of having lucid dreams.

Just before bed, the app has users hearken to a particular sound, the same as a series of beeps, and practice associating that cue with a keen awareness of their thoughts and body. When the app plays that sound again six hours later, it’s meant to reactivate that self-awareness at some stage in the slumbering user, coaxing them to became lucid mid-dream.

These different types of sensory cues have proved fairly effective for inducing lucid dreams in sleep studies. But a researcher on the whole tracks someone’s sleep to play sounds the whole way at some stage in the REM stage, when lucid dreams are likely. New experiments now show that a rough approximation of the technique the use of an app can promote lucid dreaming at home, researchers report at some stage in the October Consciousness and Cognition.

This DIY approach would perchance help more people have lucid dreams for recreation or research on the nature of consciousness (SN: eight/27/23).

Researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Sick., built and tested the app. In a single experiment, 19 people used it every night for a week. Through the previous week, the group reported a median Zero.74 lucid dreams. Through the week of app use, that ramped as much as a median 2.eleven lucid dreams. “That’s a essentially big amplify for lucid dreaming,” says Northwestern cognitive neuroscientist Karen Konkoly. “Lucid dreaming once a week is a lot.”

Nonetheless it wasn’t completely clear that the app’s sound cues resulted in that amplify. “It would perchance well be that just focusing on lucid dreaming for a week or expectations or something became responsible,” Konkoly says. So the team ran every other experiment with 112 people.

All and sundry got lucidity-triggering sounds from training while they slept the first night. But on the 2d night, the app — unbeknownst to the users — switched things up. Only forty people heard sounds from training while they slept. Every other 35 got sounds they had now now not practiced linking to lucidity. The final 37 heard no sounds.

The first night, 17 percent of participants reported lucid dreams. The 2d night, other folks who heard the sounds from training kept up that rate of lucid dreaming. But handiest 5 percent of the people at some stage in the opposite two groups had lucid dreams — hinting that the real sound cues were indeed at the back of the app’s effectiveness.