If you’ve ever experienced a dream while knowing that you were dreaming, you’ve had a lucid dream. As interest has grown in optimizing sleep for self-improvement and better health, so, too, has interest in lucid dreaming, which early evidence has shown can positively influence a person’s mood the following day.
Two recent Northwestern studies examine different facets of lucid dreaming, including a way to induce it at home and its potential to combat narcolepsy-related nightmares.
Both studies utilize a method called targeted lucidity reactivation (TLR), which combines pre-sleep training with sensory cues during sleep to induce a lucid dream.
At-home lucid dreaming
In one study, Northwestern neuroscientists provide the first evidence that TLR can be successful with minimal technical requirements — in this case, a smartphone app. The study, published in Consciousness and Cognition, is also the first to include a control group to test the effectiveness of the two-part approach of TLR.
During the first experiment, study participants used the app-based TLR to induce lucid dreams, and the subjects had an average of 2.11 lucid dreams per week, up from 0.74 lucid dreams.
“This is a dramatic increase, because even one lucid dream a week is considered quite a lot for most lucid dreamers,” said Karen Konkoly, a post-doctoral psychology fellow at Northwestern. “The goal of this line of research was to find out how many lucid dreams we could evoke with just a smartphone, and to set a baseline of ease and access for people.”
The study’s senior author is Ken Paller, James Padilla Chair in Arts and Sciences in the department of psychology at Northwestern, who earlier this month was awarded the National Institutes of Health Director’s Pioneer Award, part of the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program. Additional co-authors on the study include Nathan Whitmore, Remington Mallett and Christopher Mazurek, who also worked in the department of psychology at Northwestern.
How it worked
The app provided the 19 participants who completed the first experiment with nightly training before sleep that included a sound cue and directions to become lucid by becoming aware of their physical, mental and emotional state, and details of their surroundings. If the participant awoke from sleep, they responded to a prompt on their phone asking whether the sound cue woke them. They also completed a nightly dream log.
To determine whether lucid dreaming resulted from TLR rather than merely expectations or sleep disruption, researchers conducted a second experiment with 120 app users in which all participants received the nightly training, but on alternate nights control participants received a dummy sound cue or none at all.
On the first night of the experiment, when everyone received the real cue, 17% of participants had lucid dreams. On the second night, those who received the real cue again maintained this rate of lucid dreaming, whereas only 5% of control participants had lucid dreams. Additional evidence of lucidity was provided in participants’ dream logs.
“Tweaking sleep opens the door for people to change their dreaming,” Paller said. “We are taking a sleep-engineering approach to using sleep for personal benefits, for practicing skills, solving problems, and for spiritual and personal growth.”
The researchers say the next phase of research will experiment with wearable technology that can prevent undue awakening and determine when users are likely in REM sleep, which may increase the success rate.
Nixing narcolepsy nightmares
A new study from Northwestern Medicine demonstrates that the benefits of lucid dreaming can be combined with cognitive behavioral therapy for nightmares (CBT-N) to treat narcolepsy-related nightmares.
The study, which was published in the Journal of Sleep Research, found overall reductions in nightmare severity and frequency in all six patients tested in the small clinical trial. It’s the first study to show CBT-N might be applicable to narcolepsy, a chronic neurological disorder that affects the brain’s ability to regulate sleep and wakefulness.
“We had them imagine what they’d like to dream instead of their nightmare, almost like they’re writing a movie script,” said corresponding author Jennifer Mundt, assistant professor of neurology (sleep medicine) and psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
Between 30 to 40% of people with narcolepsy experience vivid and distressing nightmares, which can even cause patients to fear sleep, leading to increased fatigue and depression. Still, narcolepsy patients’ nightmares have often been overlooked — some study participants had experienced nightmares for decades but never received treatment.
Mundt said it is important to refer these patients for treatment because many of them don’t know anything can be done, “and treatment can completely transform their sleep and sometimes even the way they feel in the daytime in a matter of weeks,” she said.
During weekly telehealth sessions, the participants received CBT-N, which they used to
rewrite their nightmares into dreams they would prefer to have. They then rehearsed these revised scripts before falling asleep every night.
During week five of the study, half the study participants also underwent an additional procedure in Paller’s lab. While each person napped, the scientists tried to induce a lucid dream using TLR, playing sound cues associated with lucidity and with each rescripted dream when a study participant entered the REM stage.
An empowering and effective treatment
At post-treatment, all participants rated their nightmares as less severe and less frequent, and for four of the six, nightmare severity dipped below the cutoff for having nightmare disorder, Mundt said.
Of the two participants in the TLR group who entered REM sleep during the nap, one signaled being lucid. However, both recalled dreams that were similar to their rescripted dreams — something unusual for people undergoing CBT-N, Mundt said.
This study provided a proof-of-concept demonstration that it is possible to adapt TLR for narcolepsy-related nightmares.
Participants described feeling less anxious and ashamed about nightmares following the treatment.
“It’s empowering for them,” Mundt said. “They’re so surprised this works. It increases self-efficacy for managing their symptoms, and they describe how glad they are that this helped. It’s really a game-changer, mentally.”
Original article by Stephanie Kulke and Kristin Samuelson published on Northwestern Now.