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Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep.

ABSTRACT: Dreams take us to a different reality, a hallucinatory world that feels as real as any waking experience. These often-bizarre episodes are emblematic of human sleep but have yet to be adequately explained. Retrospective dream reports are subject to distortion and forgetting, presenting a fundamental challenge for neuroscientific studies of dreaming. Here we show that individuals who are asleep and in the midst of a lucid dream (aware of the fact that they are currently dreaming) can perceive questions from an experimenter and provide answers using electrophysiological signals. We implemented our procedures for two-way communication during polysomnographically verified rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep in 36 individuals. Some had minimal prior experience with lucid dreaming, others were frequent lucid dreamers, and one was a patient with narcolepsy who had frequent lucid dreams. During REM sleep, these individuals exhibited various capabilities, including performing veridical perceptual analysis of novel information, maintaining information in working memory, computing simple answers, and expressing volitional replies. Their responses included distinctive eye movements and selective facial muscle contractions, constituting correctly answered questions on 29 occasions across 6 of the individuals tested. These repeated observations of interactive dreaming, documented by four independent laboratory groups, demonstrate that phenomenological and cognitive characteristics of dreaming can be interrogated in real time. This relatively unexplored communication channel can enable a variety of practical applications and a new strategy for the empirical exploration of dreams.

SUBMITTER: Konkoly KR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8162929 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:We experience disturbed sleep in a new place, and this effect is known as the first-night effect (FNE) in sleep research. We previously demonstrated that the FNE is associated with a surveillance system in one brain hemisphere during NREM sleep, which manifests as interhemispheric asymmetry in sleep depth in the default-mode network (DMN) and increased vigilance toward monitoring external stimuli. This surveillance system may be useful for protecting vulnerable sleepers from abnormal events in unfamiliar environments. The present study investigated whether a similar surveillance system is exhibited during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. The impacts of the FNE could be different between the phasic period, in which eyes move rapidly, and the tonic period, in which eye movement ceases, of REM sleep; without the FNE, vigilance to external stimuli is generally reduced during the phasic period but not the tonic period. Thus, REM sleep was split into phasic and tonic periods. First, we replicated previous findings showing interhemispheric asymmetry in delta activity in the DMN associated with the FNE during NREM sleep. However, during REM sleep, interhemispheric asymmetry in delta activity or theta activities, two oscillatory activities during REM sleep, was not found during the phasic or tonic periods. Next, we tested whether vigilance, as measured by evoked brain responses (P2) to deviant tones, associated with the FNE was increased in one hemisphere during REM sleep. The P2 amplitudes during the phasic period were augmented by the FNE on day 1 and were significantly larger than those on day 2 when the FNE was not present. In contrast, the P2 amplitudes during the tonic period were not different across days. The P2 amplitudes showed no interhemispheric asymmetry during the phasic or tonic periods. These results suggest that while the surveillance system exhibits interhemispheric asymmetry in sleep depth and vigilance during NREM sleep, this system shows no interhemispheric asymmetry in oscillatory activities and exhibits increased vigilance in both hemispheres only during the phasic period of REM sleep. Therefore, the surveillance system associated with the FNE may involve different mechanisms during NREM and REM sleep.

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Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep.

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