I routinely control my own dreams. During a recent episode, in my dream laboratory, my experience went like this: I was asleep on a twin mattress in the dark lab room, wrapped in a cozy duvet and a blanket of silence. But I felt like I was awake. The sensation of being watched hung over me. Experimenters two rooms over peered at me through an infrared camera mounted on the wall. Electrodes on my scalp sent them signals about my brain waves. I opened my eyes—at least I thought I did—and sighed. Little specks of pink dust hovered in front of me. I examined them curiously. “Oh,” I then thought, realizing I was asleep, “this is a dream.”
In my dream I sat up slowly, my body feeling heavy. In reality I lay silently and moved my eyes left to right behind my closed eyelids. This signal, which I had learned to make through practice, was tracked by the electrodes and told the experimenters I was lucid: asleep yet aware I was dreaming. I remembered the task they had given me before I went to sleep: summon a dream character. I called out for my grandmother, and moments later simple black-and-white photographs of her appeared, shape-shifting and vague. I could sense her presence, a connection, a warmth rolling along my spine. It was a simple and meaningful dream that soon faded into a pleasant awakening.
Once I was awake, the scientists at the Dream Engineering Lab I direct at the University of Montreal asked me, through the intercom, about my perception of characters, any interactions with them and how they affected my mood on awakening. Even in her unusual forms, my grandmother had felt real, as if she had her own thoughts, feelings and agency. Reports from other dreamers often reflect similar sensations—the result of the brain’s striking ability in sleep to create realistic avatars we can interact with. Researchers suspect that these dreamy social scenarios help us learn how to interact with people in waking life.
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Many people have had lucid dreams. Typically you are immersed in an experience, then something seems “off,” and you realize you are actually dreaming. Often people wake up right after they become lucid, but with practice you can learn how to remain lucid and try to direct what happens. In the lab we can prime sleepers to have lucid dreams by waking them and then prompting them as they fall back asleep. At home you can try waking up and visualizing a lucid dream (most effectively in the early morning), creating a strong intention to become lucid before falling asleep again.
In the past few years scientists have discovered that while someone is having a lucid dream, they can communicate with an experimenter in a control room, and that person can communicate with the dreamer, giving them instructions to do something within the dream. In a landmark paper published in 2021 in Current Biology, researchers in the U.S., the Netherlands, France and Germany provided evidence of two-way, real-time communication during lucid dreams. At two locations researchers presented spoken math problems to sleeping participants, who accurately computed the correct solution. When one team asked, “What is eight minus six?” the dreamers answered with two left-right eye movements. Another team asked yes-or-no questions, and lucid dreamers frowned to indicate “no” and smiled for “yes,” with their movements recorded by electrodes around their eyebrows and mouth.
Sleep researchers are now using emerging technologies to interface directly with the dreaming mind. Meanwhile neuroimaging studies are revealing the unique patterns of brain activity that arise during lucid dreaming. This research could lead to wearable devices programmed with algorithms that detect opportune moments to induce lucidity in people as they sleep. As researchers, we are excited about this possibility because directing, or “engineering,” a dream may allow people to reduce the severity or frequency of nightmares, improve sleep quality and morning mood, and even enhance general health and well-being.
Scientists have known that lucid dreams are real since the late 1970s. In 1980 Stephen LaBerge, then a Ph.D. student at Stanford University, published a paper about the side-to-side eye-signaling method that proved lucidity’s existence. Experts went on to demonstrate that lucid dreamers could control their breathing patterns and muscle twitches, which provided ways for them to communicate with the awake world. Imaging studies revealed more wakelike activity in the brain during lucid dreams than nonlucid dreams. This momentum culminated in the first Dream x Engineering Workshop at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, which I led in 2019. LaBerge was there, along with 50 dream scientists from around the world. For two days we explored how we might engineer dreams. We focused on using new technologies to induce lucid dreams in novices and exploring the brain basis and health benefits of lucid dreaming on a larger scale.
Since then, many more researchers have become interested; progress has been quick and revealing. Investigators working in more than a dozen countries have learned how to induce and record lucid dreams with wearable devices and even use the techniques to treat nightmares, insomnia, and other sleep problems.
Lucid dreamers can communicate with people in the waking world by making eye movements, frowning or clenching their hands.
Treating nightmares is an important goal because they are linked to all manner of psychiatric and sleep disorders, including addiction, psychosis, narcolepsy and insomnia, as well as higher risks for anxiety, depression and suicide. The perils are especially relevant for people with post-traumatic stress disorder who experience nightmares, which for more than half of PTSD patients replay traumatic events again and again, potentially retraumatizing them each time. PTSD sufferers with severe nightmares have more acute symptoms and a fourfold greater risk of suicide compared with people with PTSD who don’t experience such dreams.
In a recent study, 49 PTSD patients from nine countries who had long histories of traumatic nightmares attended a week-long virtual workshop with lucid dreaming expert, trainer and author Charlie Morley. To learn how to induce lucid dreams that might heal, participants imagined positive versions of their nightmares in which they engaged curiously with the dream or with threatening dream characters. One patient reported calling out into the dreamscape, “Dreamer, heal my body!” She then experienced roaring in her ears as her body vibrated forcefully. Another patient asked to meet and befriend her anxiety, which led to the emergence of a giant, golden lozenge that evoked her amazement and gratitude. After just one week of training, all the participants had reduced their PTSD symptoms. They also recalled fewer nightmares.
Laboratory studies have yielded similar results. One person with weekly nightmares took part in a study led by one of my lab members, Remington Mallett. While sleeping in an enclosed lab bedroom with more than a dozen electrodes pasted on her scalp and face, this young woman had a nightmare. She dreamed she was in a church parking lot, and an approaching group of people with pitchforks was chanting, “Die, die, die.” She realized she was asleep and dreaming in the lab and that the experimenter was watching from the other room. She gave a left-right eye signal, knowing the experimenter would wake her up. She later said, “In the dream I was aware that you [the experimenters] were there and reachable.” She gave the signal because she knew it would get her out of the dream, and it did. Her nightmare frequency decreased after this lab visit, and four weeks later it was still lower than it had been before the experiment.
Even just the moment of becoming lucid can sometimes bring immediate relief from a nightmare because you realize you are dreaming and that there is no real danger—similar to the relief we feel when we wake up from a nightmare and realize it was just a dream. Often when people become lucid during a nightmare, they decide to simply wake up—an immediate solution. Closing and opening your eyes repeatedly is another way to intentionally wake up from a dream, which could be useful during nightmares when at home, outside a lab.
Lucid dreaming could improve sleep health more generally. For example, we now know that people with insomnia have more unpleasant dreams than sound sleepers, including dreams in which they feel like they are awake and are worrying about not sleeping. In one recent study, insomnia patients underwent two weeks of lucid-dream training that included setting presleep intentions of becoming lucid and visualizing the kind of lucid dream they wanted to have. These practices led to less severe insomnia and less frequent anxiety and depressive symptoms in participants over time. It could be that the increased lucidity made them more aware of the fact that they were asleep, thereby improving their subjective sense of sleep quality. It’s also likely that lucid dreaming made their dreams more pleasant; my team and other researchers have shown numerous times that both lucid and positive dreams are associated with better sleep quality, mood and restfulness after waking.
To improve dream engineering, we need to have a clearer understanding of what is happening in the brain during lucid dreams. Recent work in sleep and neuroscience labs is revealing the brain patterns involved.
Our most vivid dreaming takes place during rapid-eye-movement, or REM, sleep—the light phase of sleep when the brain is most active and wakelike, especially when close to the time that a person would usually get up. Lucidity may enhance one of the main functions of REM sleep: to refresh connections between the prefrontal cortex, where our brains control our thoughts and decisions, and the amygdala, where they generate our emotions. Sleep helps us control our emotions every day. When REM sleep is disrupted, the prefrontal cortex becomes less effective at regulating arousal both during sleep and during the subsequent day. This creates a vicious cycle for people with nightmares and insomnia: a night of poor sleep is followed by a worse mood and decreased defenses against stress the next day, leading to another night of disturbed sleep, and so on.
In contrast, lucid dreaming is associated with increased activation in the prefrontal cortex. To have stable lucid dreams, you need to remain calm and attentive, or you will probably wake up from excitement. Maintaining self-control seems to be central to having positive lucid-dream experiences, resolving nightmares, and boosting creativity and mood. That was the conclusion of a recent study by Mallett, who surveyed 400 posts on Reddit to identify exactly when and how lucid dreams are helpful for improving mental health.
We’re learning that the real mental health benefits of lucid dreaming seem to come when dreamers can direct the content. Maintaining self-control in dreams is a bit of a learned skill. Similar to mindfulness, the dreamer must practice remaining both calm and focused while in an unpredictable and unstable dream. People can then learn to control dreams by using tricks of attention such as opening and closing their eyes and expecting, or even commanding, an object such as the Eiffel Tower to appear. This skill most likely relies on specific patterns of neural activation and on cognitive practice. To be at once an actor in and director of a lucid dream requires delicate cognitive control and flexibility, but expert lucid dreamers—people who have lucid dreams at least weekly—would probably say “control” is not the most accurate term. It’s more of an improvisation, a balancing act of guiding the dream toward desired content while allowing it to arise spontaneously—like a jazz musician suggesting a rhythm or melody but also listening and adjusting to what the other musicians are playing.
To better understand how this improvisation happens, my colleague Catherine Duclos is studying the basic brain patterns of lucid dreaming in expert lucid dreamers in our Montreal lab. The volunteers sleep normally for the first half of the night, but in the early morning experimenters awaken them to place a cap on their head that is used for electroencephalogram (EEG) tests. The cap has 128 electrodes—many more than are typically used in sleep studies. After about 30 minutes, when all the electrodes are well positioned, the subjects return to sleep, intending to have a lucid dream.
Once Duclos has identified patterns of brain-wave activity that occur only in lucid dreams, she can use that information in the lab to try to directly enhance lucidity and control by augmenting activation in the cortex with electrical brain stimulation. After decades of characterizing sleep as an “offline” brain process, scientists now view the sleeping brain as “entrainable”—it is malleable and can be controlled through external stimulation. By applying an electric current of a specific wavelength to the scalp, scientists can modulate the rhythm of the sleeping brain to make brain waves faster and more wakelike in REM sleep or slower as they are in deep sleep.
One woman having a nightmare produced a left-right eye signal, knowing a researcher watching her would wake her up.
Duclos plans to use transcranial alternating-current stimulation (tACS) to shape brain rhythms so that they are more similar to those in lucid dreams, based on the patterns she finds in the dreams she is recording now. Researchers in prior studies have also attempted to use tACS to induce lucid dreams, with mixed results. We hope the increased resolution of high-density EEG will help.
Another study of expert lucid dreamers will also help clarify how cognitive control works in a lucid dream. Tobi Matzek, one of my Ph.D. students and an expert lucid dreamer, spent four nights in our lab being recorded by EEG. Each night, as early morning approached, we awakened her and presented a 20-minute instruction over speakers in the bedroom, training her to pay attention to what she was experiencing after we woke her and to maintain this awareness when sleeping. She then fell back asleep and became lucid repeatedly. She used control strategies such as calling out requests for desired characters in the dream. In one instance, Matzek said she called for “God to appear as a perceivable form,” and an emerging ball of white light brought with it feelings of euphoria. She awoke in awe.
Matzek had eight lucid dreams, in which she summoned dream figures whom she perceived as having higher levels of self-control and independent thoughts than typical dream characters. (Her dreams described in this article were presented at a recent conference.) This study is showing us how our sleeping brain creates dream characters and just how meaningful fictional and at times otherworldly social scenarios can feel. Lucid dreamers who can conjure up characters rate these dreams as more positive and mystical than other dreams. It’s possible that lucid dreams could create opportunities to visit with lost loved ones, spiritual teachers, or family and friends, but so far we know little about how to generate such experiences or how they might impact waking life.
Matzek and other expert lucid dreamers sometimes ask big questions during their dreams. One night Matzek asked, “Can I experience the creation of the universe?” and she dreamed of being “immersed in outer space, surrounded by stars and planets and other huge celestial objects…. The darkness of space is deep and rich, and every planet and star is superbright.” At one point she felt overwhelmed by the vastness, but a spiritual presence helped her stay calm. The end result, she says, was “absolutely breathtaking.” She felt weightless and was “slowly spinning head over heels as I take in everything around me. Many [stars] are brown and red, and it’s like they’re all glowing. I know that I am actually seeing the universe uncreated, back in time.” Understanding what’s happening inside the brain during these altered states of consciousness could reveal how to induce such mystical experiences on demand.
Dreams are ephemeral, but they feel real and impactful because the brain and body experience them as real. Brain imaging shows that our dreams are read as “real” in the sensorimotor cortex. When we dream of clenching a fist, the motor cortex becomes more active, and muscles in the forearm twitch. Dreaming is the ultimate reality simulator.
Because the body experiences physical reality in sleep, we can use visual cues, sounds, and other sensations—pressure, temperature, vibration—to sculpt the dreamworld. In my lab we use flashing lights or beeping sounds during presleep lucidity training. As we did for Matzek, we wake up participants in the early morning and pursue a 20-minute training: while they lie in bed with their eyes closed, a recorded voice instructs them to remain self-aware and to pay attention to their ongoing sensory experiences. We present the flashing lights and beeping alongside this tracking so the sensory cues will serve as reminders to remain lucid.
When participants go back to sleep, we present the cues again during REM sleep to “reactivate” the associated mind state. Fifty percent of the time, participants have a lucid dream—a higher rate than without the cues. Beeping sounds played during sleep caused one person to dream of shopping in a supermarket: “I was just putting things in my trolley, and I could hear the beeping, and it was like I was getting loads of messages on my phone telling me what to buy in Tesco … things like, ‘Buy some biscuits.’” The cues made their way into the dream and served as reminders to become lucid.
Dream engineers around the world, such as Daniel Erlacher and Emma Peters of the Institute of Sport Science at Bern University in Switzerland, are exploring new types of sensory stimuli to more reliably induce lucid dreams. These cues include subtle vibrations that could be delivered by a wearable headband or smart ring, little electric pulses that cause muscles to twitch, or vestibular stimulation—an electric current sent behind the ears that induces sensations of falling or spinning. These sensations might be more easily detectable by dreamers than flashing lights and beeping sounds, perhaps because dreams already have so much competing visual and auditory content.
Lucid dreamers can communicate with people in the waking world by controlling their sleeping bodies. In addition to making deliberate eye movements, lucid dreamers can frown, clench their hands or control their breathing, and scientists can record all of this in the lab. They can measure respiration with a belt around the torso that detects expansion and contraction of the lungs or with a little sensor on the lip that can track the flow of air in and out of the nose. Kristoffer Appel of the Institute of Sleep and Dream Technologies in Germany has even decoded word messages from lucid dreamers. The dreamers held their thumb out in front of their face, traced letters, and followed the movement of their thumb with their eyes. Dreamers could say, with their eye movements, “Hello, dream.” We are learning to converse with lucid dreamers, getting ever more complex messages into and out of the sleeping brain and body to direct and record dreams in real time.
I expect that the mental health applications of lucid dreaming will grow. Achilleas Pavlou and Alejandra Montemayor Garcia of the University of Nicosia Medical School in Cyprus are developing wearable devices programmed with machine-learning algorithms to detect when nightmares are occurring based on bio-signals such as brain activity, breathing and heart rate. My team, along with collaborators at the Donders Institute in the Netherlands and the IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy, is testing a simple EEG headband that can detect REM sleep and deliver the kinds of sensory cues I mentioned earlier to induce lucid dreams. If successful, such dream aids could be made widely available at home. Headbands and watches could help people call for help to escape nightmares—or just help them induce lucid dreams or direct the content for more satisfying dreams.
People could also use these tools simply to have exotic recreational experiences. In 2024 Adam Haar, who recently finished a postdoctoral fellowship at M.I.T., and artist Carsten Höller created an exhibit in a museum in Basel, Switzerland, that welcomed overnight visitors. A bed on six robotic legs created a rocking motion before and during sleep, while a fly agaric mushroom sculpture spun above the bed. In the liminal space before sleep onset, the dreamer was reminded to dream of flying, and rocking motions and flashing red light from the installation seeped through their body and eyelids.
These stimuli were replayed at various moments throughout the night, and the sleeper was then awakened for dream reports. One visitor noted visions of “floating on the sea … and climbing inside the squishy stalk of a giant mushroom from the bottom and being engulfed in its gravityless squishy innards,” even of being buffeted up from the ground on the wind. In the weeks after, this woman reported “countless flight-adjacent or weightlessness dreams,” such as “gliding in the air along miles of zip line through a Swiss-looking city.”
For lucid dreamers, flying is one of the most sought-after and euphoric experiences. In a 2020 study led by Claudia Picard-Deland of the University of Montreal’s Dream and Nightmare Laboratory, participants used a virtual-reality flight simulation prior to taking a nap and then recorded their dreams for two weeks at home. Playing in the virtual-reality environment for just 15 minutes led to an eightfold increase in flying dreams. And even though the study was not designed to induce lucidity, the experimenters found that flying dreams elevated it. One participant had their first-ever lucid dream: “I succeeded to make myself float a little, then once I realized that it worked, that I had control, I put my hands just like Iron Man at my sides…. I heard a big boom and a constant noise, as if I had plane propellers at the ends of my arms, and I accelerated so fast I couldn’t believe it. I screamed with joy as loud as I could.” The participant marveled at “the quantity of detail of physical sensations that I felt from flying, the intense acceleration, the wind,” as well as seeing, from above, a beautiful city from the future.
Other gadgets may not be far off. Haar developed Dormio during his Ph.D. work at M.I.T. It is basically a glove with sensors that can measure muscle flexion, heart rate and electrical skin activity, all of which change as you drift off to sleep. When Dormio detects that you’ve just fallen asleep, it gives a spoken prompt to influence what you dream about. After a couple of minutes, it wakes you up to recall imagery, and if you follow this process several times, you can engineer brief dreams that have content you desire.
Nathan Whitmore of the M.I.T. Media Lab has developed a phone app to deliver voice training for lucid dreaming, paired with auditory cues presented again during sleep. Initial results with more than 100 participants showed that presleep training brought on lucid dreams. Ken Paller of Northwestern University and Mallett have discovered EEG signatures that seem to precede the onset of lucidity. Such measures could lead to algorithms that detect opportune moments to deliver sensory cues and induce lucid dreams. Pair these with a flying game prior to sleep, and you might be in for a fun night.
