Learning While Dreaming

A man is standing on train tracks. A subway train is racing toward him, lights blinding, brakes screeching deafeningly. But he stays calm. No flight response, no panic — because he knows that this is only a dream. In Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi film about dreamworlds, Inception, characters test whether or not they are dreaming with small spinning tops, or “totems”. As soon as they realize they are dreaming, they fly through buildings, run up walls and transform rooms to test the limits of what their imaginations can do. A fantasy world? Yes, but not one that is entirely divorced from reality. In real-life lucid dreams, people are aware that they are dreaming, and they can control them deliberately.

The man who flew out of his kitchen

Daniel Erlacher, a sports scientist and psychologist at the University of Bern, fell upon the topic as a student, mostly by coincidence. “I was reading a book by Stephen LaBerge, a pioneer of lucid dreaming research. At first it all sounded pretty esoteric to me, but I was keen to try out the techniques that were described in it.” A few weeks later, Erlacher had his first lucid dream. In it, he was playing basketball in his parents’ kitchen, realized he was dreaming, jumped out of the window and flew around the house. “Being able to control my behavior in the dream was so fascinating that I developed the focus of my research, and later my doctorate, around it.”

Lucid dreams are a long-recognized phenomenon, described even by Aristotle. Eventually, in 1913, Dutch doctor Frederik van Eeden coined the term “lucid dream” that we now use. In the late twentieth century, a clever trick delivered a scientific breakthrough: researchers and their test subjects agreed on specific eye movements to complete during sleep — twice to the left, twice to the right — as soon as they realized they were dreaming. The movements were recorded in the sleep laboratory and confirmed: lucid dreaming is real.

Sleeping, dreaming and practicing your throw

Erlacher was fascinated and asked himself whether lucid dreams could prove useful for mental training, which improves certain motor skills while awake. Why could that not also work in a dream? He and his team got their study participants to follow simple exercises during lucid dreaming, such as flipping a coin or tapping their fingers in a specific rhythm. Upon awaking in a sleep laboratory, the researchers had them repeat the movements and confirmed improvements. “These are promising results, even if lucid dreaming as a targeted training in sports remains rare,” says Erlacher.

One stumbling block for this still young field of research is that only a minority of people have mastered the technique of lucid dreaming. “About a third of people surveyed do occasionally have lucid dreams, but only around five percent report them regularly,” says Erlacher. “For us, it means that the search for suitable study participants is extremely difficult.” This only makes discovering the methods to master lucid dreaming even more valuable.

What does your body do in a lucid dream?

Practices such as keeping a dream diary or performing reality checks can be helpful; if you repeatedly ask yourself during the day whether you are dreaming, you will eventually carry this routine into the dream sphere – allowing you to recognize the illusion. Waking up in the middle of the night and going back to sleep with a clear intention in mind can also help.

A particularly gripping aspect for Erlacher is how we experience our bodies while dreaming. Do they feel the same as they do while awake, or do they instead perhaps feel completely different? “These questions dive deep into the basic research of consciousness and body image, and I’m not sure if we’ll get the answers in the near future,” says Erlacher. “Because lucid dreaming is still a mystery, and studying it with many more people could rob a little of its magic.”


About:
Daniel Erlacher is an associate professor in the Department of Movement and Exercise Science at the University of Bern. He specializes in the field of lucid dreaming and studies how these dreams can contribute to the improvement of athletic skills and mental resilience.

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