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Can We Control Our Dreams?
While we’re awake, we have conscious control over what we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste. In the world of dreams, we have an illusion of that control — a facsimile of it. In our dreams, we are simultaneously constructing our reality and controlling our actions within it. (If this doesn’t seem meta, then I don’t know what does.) Yet, despite the seemingly godlike control we have over our dreams, how come we struggle to shape it to our whims? I’m sure most of you have had the experience of waking from a dream to realize, “that didn’t make sense at all,” or “how could I have not realized so many things that didn’t make sense?” In essence, we don’t have full voluntary control of our dreams.
But what if we can control our dreams? In the famous fictional anime Sword Art Online, the NerveGear helmet can stimulate all five senses through the user’s sleeping brain so that the user can play a virtual reality massively multiplayer online role-playing game (VRMMORPG). In the show, the game is released in 2022. Of course, in reality, we would not have such a game by then even if we want to. But nevertheless, is dream manipulation, even on a smaller scale, still possible?
Researchers at MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces already figured out how to somewhat manipulate dreams using a technique called targeted dream incubation (TDI), which takes advantage of a sleep stage called hypnagogia, a transitional state between waking and sleeping states(Weisberger, 2020). Targeted memory activation makes use of sensory stimuli to reactivate memories during sleep. A sleep tracker, Dormio, communicates with an app that delivers audio cues to the subject at specific times to influence the content of the subject’s dreams. The researchers found that 67% of the dream reports reported dreams that integrate the prompted memory, so it seems possible that dreams can be influenced by some external manipulation using outside stimuli (Horowitz et. al, 2020).
If we ever want to have voluntary control of our dreams, then it’s useful to know what is being activated in our brains during sleep. The first sense we often think about when it comes to dreams is vision. Visual events are what we usually remember from our dreams. Surprisingly, the primary visual cortex is inactive during dreams. However, the visual association cortex that processes imagery associations is…
