App may help people have lucid dreams, research suggests

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Hoping to consciously know when you are dreaming? There’s an app that may allow that to happen.

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Recent experiments and research into lucid dreaming suggests people trained to hear beeping sounds overnight can increase the chances of making them aware while asleep.

Researchers in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University in Illinois sought to provoke lucid dreams with auditory cues by creating a publicly available app for android phones that beeps overnight.

“The ability to realize that you’re dreaming — lucid dreaming — has value for personal goals and for consciousness research,” the authors wrote in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. “One route to lucid dreaming is to first undergo pre-sleep training with sensory cues and then receive those cues during REM sleep.”

The first experiment, using a method called Targeted Lucidity Reactivation, found 19 study participants reported increased lucid dreaming, an average 0.74 lucid dreams per week before using the app to 2.11 lucid dreams after seven days of the app’s use.

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“That’s a really big increase for lucid dreaming,” Karen Konkoly, a Northwestern cognitive neuroscientist and one of the study’s authors, told Science News. “Lucid dreaming once a week is a lot.”

However, researchers were unsure if that was the case.

“It could be that just focusing on lucid dreaming for a week or expectations or something was responsible,” Konkoly said.

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A second experiment was conducted with 112 people, but not all the participants heard the same sounds on the second night of sleep.

Researchers allowed 40 people to hear sounds from their training. However, 35 subjects heard noises they didn’t listen to while the rest, 37 participants, didn’t hear any sounds at all during the test.

On the first night, lucid dreaming was reported by 17% of participants. The second night saw people who were trained to hear the app’s sounds continued to have the same lucid dreaming rate.

That was in contrast to the 5% of the other participants who reported having lucid dreams but didn’t hear the app’s beeping, which may be a sign that the app had an effect on people’s dreams.

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