Scientists looked into the efficacy of an app that claims to help people lucid dream — and found it was a runaway success.
Published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition, this study out of Northwestern University seems to demonstrate that so-called "Targeted Lucidity Reactivation" (TLR) can help people remember their dreams, and even propel them into a fascinating dive into the subconscious.
The app involves training people to associate a specific sound, such as a tone or melody, with the awareness of dreaming. That sound is then played while subjects are asleep, tipping them off that they're not in the waking world helping them enter the state of lucid dreaming.
In a two-part study, Northwestern psychology researchers first recruited participants — 19 in the first phase, and 416 in the second — who historically remembered their dreams upon waking.
Using a specialized Android smartphone app, the participants in the first phase completed one week of TLR training that consisted of 20-minute sessions in which they were instructed to associate the sound, which was either a sequence of beeps or a violin note, with lucid dreaming.
After participants fell asleep, the app would stay on and play these sound cues on a six-hour delay softly, so as not to wake the dreamers. In the morning, study subjects were asked to write down any dreams they remembered, and whether they were lucid or the sound was merely incorporated into the dream's narrative.
Second-phase participants had a similar training protocol, with some variation in the post-sleep execution: some would get the cues they were trained on, while others would get unrelated sounds or no cues at all.
In both phases, participants who received the sound cues on which they were trained reported the highest frequency of lucid dreaming. In the first phase, subjects reported an average of 2.11 lucid dreams during the training week compared to 0.74 before — a nearly three-fold increase.
As PsyPost notes, this experiment appears to be the first to take lucid dreaming research out of a sleep laboratory setting and into the hands of the public. By the way, for those wondering, you can try out the app here.
In an interview with PsyPost, study author and Northwestern postdoctoral student Karen Konkoly gushed that these findings could help bring lucid dreaming to the masses.
"Since we’ve been developing more effective ways to induce lucid dreams in the sleep laboratory," Konkoly said, "we wanted to take a step towards making these advances available for individuals to use on their own."
More on dream research: Startup Claims It's Achieved Communication Between Two People Who Were Both Dreaming
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