Scientists Talked To People In Their Dreams. They Answered

Scientists Talked To People In Their Dreams. They Answered

James Doubek

For example, a typical question would be to ask what is 8 minus 6. A 19-year-old American man was able to respond by moving his eyes left-right, left-right — two times — to signal "2." Researchers asked the question again, and he moved his eyes the same way two times again.

Out of the 158 trials among 36 participants, about 18% of the time, they were able to give correct answers. In another 18%, it wasn't clear whether participants were responding or not. They were wrong 3% of the time. Most often, 61%, participants didn't respond at all.

For the people dreaming, they didn't always interpret the questions they were hearing as a simple question from researchers. "Sometimes stimuli were perceived as coming from outside the dream, but other times, the stimuli emanated from elements of the dream, contextualized in a way that made sense in relation to ongoing dream content," the researchers write. One participant "heard the questions transposed over their dream as though it was God talking to them," Konkoly says.

Sci Am paper with added details ->

People Answer Scientists’ Queries in Real Time while Dreaming

Diana Kwon

One of the coauthors, Karen Konkoly, a graduate student in Paller’s lab, speculates that participants failed to respond in 60 percent of the trials because they simply did not perceive the incoming communication. In those cases, they rarely reported any incorporation of the questions into their dreams after waking up. However, she adds that it is also possible that dreamers perceived the inputs but paid little attention and forgot before awakening. The proportion of people who respond could potentially be improved with more training or by presenting questions when people are in specific sleeping brain states, Konkoly says.

What's interesting to me is how this parallels medium communication...