If you wish to have a dream the place you realize you’re dreaming, you is likely to be in luck. A telephone app appears to spice up customers’ odds of getting lucid goals.
Earlier than mattress, the app has customers hearken to a particular sound, equivalent to a collection of beeps, and follow associating that cue with a eager consciousness of their ideas and physique. When the app performs that sound once more six hours later, it’s meant to reactivate that self-awareness within the sleeping person, coaxing them to change into lucid mid-dream.
These kinds of sensory cues have proved pretty efficient for inducing lucid goals in sleep research. However a researcher normally tracks somebody’s sleep to play sounds through the REM stage, when lucid goals are most definitely. New experiments now present {that a} tough approximation of the approach utilizing an app can promote lucid dreaming at house, researchers report within the October Consciousness and Cognition.
This DIY method would possibly assist extra individuals have lucid goals for recreation or analysis on the character of consciousness (SN: 8/27/23).
Researchers at Northwestern College in Evanston, Ailing., constructed and examined the app. In a single experiment, 19 individuals used it each evening for every week. Throughout the earlier week, the group reported a median 0.74 lucid goals. Throughout the week of app use, that ramped as much as a median 2.11 lucid goals. “That’s a extremely massive improve for lucid dreaming,” says Northwestern cognitive neuroscientist Karen Konkoly. “Lucid dreaming as soon as every week is rather a lot.”
But it surely wasn’t utterly clear that the app’s sound cues led to that improve. “It may very well be that simply specializing in lucid dreaming for every week or expectations or one thing was accountable,” Konkoly says. So the workforce ran one other experiment with 112 individuals.
Everybody received lucidity-triggering sounds from coaching whereas they slept the primary evening. However on the second evening, the app — unbeknownst to the customers — switched issues up. Solely 40 individuals heard sounds from coaching whereas they slept. One other 35 received sounds that they had not practiced linking to lucidity. The ultimate 37 heard no sounds.
The primary evening, 17 p.c of members reported lucid goals. The second evening, individuals who heard the sounds from coaching saved up that charge of lucid dreaming. However solely 5 p.c of the individuals within the different two teams had lucid goals — hinting that the actual sound cues had been certainly behind the app’s effectiveness.
