Using sensors and a specific language, scientists came into contact with a person who was asleep.
Lucid dreaming is the time of sleep during which we dream and are conscious of it. This occurs during paradoxical sleep, the last stage of sleep, and some rare individuals thus manage to influence their dreams, to a certain extent. The company REMspacean American start-up specializing in neurotechnology, therefore decided to exploit this phase to communicate with a sleeper.
To do this, they encouraged the subjects of the experiment to think very hard about wanting to become aware of their dreams before they dozed off. Experts also created a dream language called Remmyo, detectable by sensors and constructed from facial contractions. Each specific muscle contraction is associated with a letter. They are compiled in threes to form words.
The researchers then used monitors to detect lucid dreams. “The best way to do this is to ask the dreamer to move their eyes in accordance with given movements, since the eyes are the only organs that are not paralyzed when sleeping,” explained Michael Raduga, creator of the company and author of books on sleep. If motion is detected, then the device knows that the sleeper is aware that they are dreaming.
They then came into contact with the sleepers. Once the server detected a lucid dream, they sent a random Remmyo phrase to the sleeping person’s headphones so they could hear it during the dream. The participant then repeated this word in their dream and this message was stored by a device, before being sent to another participant, a few minutes later, creating a form of inter-dream communication. “The experiment was a success, the sensors were able to detect the phrase repeated by the first dreamer. Then our servers transferred the message to a second, then to a third dreamer. The latter two were able to repeat the phrase in question to their awakening,” said the specialist.
However, he warns that this exercise should not be practiced regularly, as it could affect the subject’s sleep. The founder of the company, however, sees it as a technology of the future: “Yesterday, communicating in dreams looked like science fiction, tomorrow, it will be so common that we will no longer imagine our lives without this technology”, said he said in a press release. These results still need to be confirmed by further research.