do you remember any of your dreams this week? Every night when you fall asleep
you enter a dream world where anything is possible
this week I've skied with my family, run on the beach and return to a restaurant
yeah my dreams are not that fantastical... but for some people what their dreams
are a world of wonder and control. I'm talking about lucid dreaming, where the
person is aware that they're dreaming while they're in the dream and in some
cases lucid dreamers can even control their own dreams all while they're asleep
after I released my sleep show last month, you asked a lot of questions
about lucid dreaming. But to move into the realm of my opinion, I have never
understood the hype behind lucid dreaming
I've always wondered that if you're alert while you're asleep, wouldn't you
then be tired the next day? I think lucid dreaming is overrated potentially
harmful and maybe irresponsible for researchers and the media to be
encouraging people to do it. Maybe people should stop trying to control every
single aspect of their life and just get a good night's sleep. But for what it's
worth I looked into it and I was a little wrong, just a bit wrong because
lucid dreaming can have benefits but most of all studying these dreams can
help us understand more about the nature of consciousness. This episode is
sponsored by brilliant, more on brilliant later. So lucid dreaming is nothing new
it's been referred to as dream yoga in Buddhism for thousands of years and in
the Western world old mate Aristotle wrote "often when one is asleep there
is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself
is but a dream" The term lucid dreaming or “rêve lucide" first appeared in the
mid-1800s in a book by this guy French researcher Marie-Jean-Léon Lecoq, Baron d'Hervey
de Juchereau, Marquis d'Hervey de Saint Denys. In the 1970s that researchers
tested a way that people could communicate that they were lucid in a
dream by pre-arranged eye movements. So the dreamer would say okay when I'm
lucid I'm going to move my eyes left right left and then
the researchers would see they're in REM sleep and know they were lucid. This has
maybe predictably faced some criticism as a reliable way of doing research but
we still don't have a better way to send signals from the dream world to the
regular world. By using this method one study found that when people did ten at
deep squats in their dreams their heart rate increase while they were sleeping
and another study found that lucid dreams can help improve motor skills
like if you practice tossing a coin into a cup while you're in a lucid dream
you'll be better added in real life the next day. Outside of eye movements
lucid dreaming has been used as a type of therapy to help with PTSD and
chronic nightmares, though not always it with very much success. Now at this point
you might be thinking "enough of a history lesson can you tell us how to
actually lucid dream?" Well the most common ways are by intention setting and
waking yourself up to super early and then going back to sleep, but I'm not
gonna go into it in more detail because lots of people have already covered this.
But what no one has asked in any of these videos (including myself three
years ago) is is there a negative side to lucid dreaming? Is it safe? And should we
actually encourage people to try it? So to answer these questions I turn to an
expert. So my name is Nirit Soffer-Dudek and I'm a researcher a dream researcher,
consciousness researcher and I'm also clinical psychologist. And Nirit has a
real lucid dreaming reality check. I think there is kind of an agenda towards
researching the positive side. And the ability to control your dream is
overhyped in the media too. Actually most people don't know but most
lucid dreamers aren't in control usually you can't control everything so you like
find yourself somewhere and you can say hey well I'm lucid and sometimes you
realize it and then shortly after you wake up. But beyond this what I found the most
interesting was research that's looking at lucid dreaming to understand
consciousness. Think about it this way: we can
understand more about our brain when it's awake by looking at it when it's
dreaming. One of the big questions about consciousness is where does
consciousness come from in the brain? So one way to figure this out it would be
to look at the brain activity of someone when they're conscious and then when
they're unconscious, except there is a lot of difference between a waking and
sleeping brain and not all of it necessarily has anything to do with
consciousness but in theory the brain of someone who is lucid dreaming should
look exactly the same as when they're normally dreaming they in the same stage
of sleep but the one major difference is that when they're lucid dreaming that
conscious so researchers hope that by comparing people's brain activity when
they're lucid dreaming and then normally dreaming they'll be able to figure out
or at least get a few clues about where consciousness comes from in the brain so
preliminary research has found that lucid dreaming is associated with
increased activity in the frontal parts of the brain particularly the prefrontal
cortex which when you're awake is responsible for decision-making
self-control and planning but a problem there's always a problem is that it
turns out lucid dreaming is actually quite hard to study in a lab people who
reported being able to lucid dream quite regularly at home were usually unable to
do it in a lab setting and that's really not that surprising when you consider
that at home it your bed is usually quite comfortable and in a lab an fMRI
machine is not. So unfortunately researchers can't yet answer the
question where does consciousness come from in the brain?
we'll get there! But the fact that some brain areas are more active during lucid
dreaming brings us back to another question: should you do it? The prefrontal
parts of your brain are more active and these parts are usually deactivated in
such sleep. Wait a minute maybe this part of the brain isn't supposed to be you
know so active while I'm sleeping so maybe I show you do this all the time?
Now some studies that showed that lucid dreaming is linked to improved mental
health but then other research shows the complete opposite the trying to lucid
dream is associated with sleep problems stress and depression
It could be people who tried it would have been more likely to experience these symptoms
anyway or perhaps there's a placebo effect at play and other people would
think that trying it is good for their mental health whatever is going on here
the reality is there is not a lot of media hardly any that talks about the
risks and if you experience depression or bipolar disorder
I cannot imagine it would be fun to try something that actually makes that worse
one thing to remember is that some techniques people use to induce lucid
dreaming actually disrupt your sleep which is bad for you so please look out
for your sleep. Aside from the fact that I'm overly skeptical of everything and
maybe that's a personal issue at lucid dreaming is super cool I said it lucid
dreaming shows us what's possible when the mind is left to its own devices when
you'll just inside your head and you don't have to deal with all the pesky
influences of your environment... if it you can actually achieve lucidity. And if you
are still wondering should i hack my sleep? I spoke it to the Big Think all
about this so please go and check out the video on their Channel. And finally
one thing that I've learned about being skeptical is that you need to be able to
understand the data to either back up your point of view or learn that you're
a bit wrong I've been brushing up on statistics with daily challenges and a
short course from Brilliant, a science and maths enrichment learning platform I
like Brilliant because they cater to all different levels so if you want you can
go deeper from a daily challenge into a course or if you're having trouble my
statistics are a little bit rusty help is just a click away if you want to know
what I mean that was a statistics joke and you either want to brush up or
master science problems every day go to brilliant org slash braincraft and sign
up for free and also the first 200 at brain crap you is that use that link it
will get 20% off an annual premium subscription.