A study from four independent teams report that lucid dreaming during the REM sleep stage allows for two-way communication.

In reality, Mazurek was napping on a bed inside a laboratory during his third session of being induced into a lucid dream (in which you are aware, while dreaming, that what you are experiencing is in fact a dream) by a research team at Northwestern University in 2019?

Northwestern’s research team had asked Mazurek to signal to them—while asleep—that he was having a lucid dream.

“My question was: ‘Can the awareness of a lucid dream extend to the outside world?’” says Emma Chabani, study author and member of the Brain and Spine Institute at Sorbonne University in France.

Chabani defines lucid dreaming as the awareness of being in one’s dream, “with reflexive thoughts on [one’s] inner world.” For those who’ve experienced one or more lucid dreams, it can feel as if one’s awake inside their dream—consciously aware that they’re dreaming while remaining asleep.

First, the researchers trained study participants to communicate to the researchers with eye movements if they were successful in achieving lucid sleep.

These included participants confirming that they were having a lucid dream by answering “yes” when prompted by an audio or visual stimulation.

The footage includes electrophysiological signals—both aural and visual signals once REM was confirmed—beginning with Northwestern’s research team asking participants to confirm whether they were having a lucid dream.

Lucid dreaming, Chabani says, was the key to opening dreamers to receiving information, in that it allows sleepers to be more aware of the external world.

Even before participating in the study, Mazurek had wanted to learn how to lucidly dream.

More exposure and training throughout the experiment, Mazurek says, gave him an “awareness” he believes is key to reaching a lucid state while dreaming.

“It is possible lucid dreaming is easier with the number of lucid dreams,” Chabani says.

“It aids our understanding of the complexity of sleep and dreams by integrating novel approaches to the study of two-way communication during sleep,” Mackey says.

While there is still a significant amount of work to be done in this area, she says, “this study does represent substantial progress toward identifying ways to leverage and gain valuable information from lucid dreams

“If we’re able to get a technique down for lucid dream induction, the applications are wild and limitless,” Mazurek says