Research In Lucid Dreaming: Today and in the Future

 

    Dreaming is a challenging thing to study, since study participants do not remember everything about their dreams (Konkoly et. al 1). In Karen Konkoly's research, she explores lucid dreaming, but she does this while the participant is sleeping to get more accurate results. During the study, the participant will be in REM sleep, and can answer questions asked by the experimenter. These questions included math problems, yes-or-no questions, and discriminating stimuli (Konkoly et. al 2). Their answers were conveyed by eye and facial movement (Konkoly et. al 2). The main aspect of lucid dreaming that her team investigates is if people are able to communicate with lucid dreamers.

    In "What Lucid Dreams Look Like" by Susana Martinez-Conde, researchers also looked into lucid dreaming, but instead of communication, they studied the dream imagery and investigated if what lucid dreamers see in their dreams is based on imagination or reality (Martinez-Conde 7). But, similar to Konkoly et. al's study, Stephen LaBerge, Benjamin Baird, and Phillip G. Zimbardo also ran their study while participants were sleeping.

    In their study, LaBerge et. al used EEG and elector-oculugram to look at brain activity and eye movement (Martinez-Conde 7). They used eye movement as a way of knowing when the participant was currently lucid dreaming. Later in the study, researchers used eye tracking to watch how participants followed objects in their lucid dream (Martinez-Conde 7).

    Reading Konkoly et. al's research was very interesting to me, as it was my first time learning about doing dream research while the participant is actively asleep. When I read Martinez-Conde's article about another study conducted about lucid dreaming, also while the participant was asleep, I thought it was very interesting to learn about another study using the same method but to look for an answer to a completely different question. I am excited for any future findings to come out about lucid dreaming using this method, or to potentially even learn about new methods to study lucid dreaming and get the most accurate results possible.

References:

(1) Karen R. Konkoly et. al. "Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep", Current Biology, Volume 31, Issue 7, 2021, Pages 1417-1427.e6, ISSN 0960-9822, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2021.01.026

(2) Martinez-Conde, S. (2018, September 7). What lucid dreams look like. Scientific American Blog Network. Retrieved October 22, 2021 from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/illusion-chasers/what-lucid-dreams-look-like/.