A phone app can help people have lucid dreams

If you want to have a dream where you know you’re dreaming, you might be in luck. A phone app appears to increase users’ chances of lucid dreaming.

Before bed, the app has users listen to a specific sound, such as a series of beeps, and practice associating that signal with a sharp awareness of their thoughts and body. When the app plays that sound six hours later, it’s meant to reactivate that awareness in the sleeping user, prompting them to become lucid mid-dream.

These types of sensory cues have proven quite effective in inducing lucid dreaming in sleep studies. But a researcher usually tracks someone’s sleep to play sounds during the REM stage, when lucid dreaming is most likely. New experiments now show that a rough approximation of the technique using an app can induce lucid dreaming at home, researchers report in October. Consciousness and Cognition.

This DIY approach could help more people have lucid dreams for recreation or research into the nature of consciousness (SN: 27/8/23).

Researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., built and tested the app. In one experiment, 19 people used it every night for a week. Over the past week, the group reported an average of 0.74 lucid dreams. During the week of using the app, this increased to an average of 2.11 lucid dreams. “That’s a really big increase for lucid dreaming,” says Northwestern cognitive neuroscientist Karen Konkoly. “Lucid dreaming once a week is too much.”

But it wasn’t entirely clear that the app’s voice cues led to that increase. “It could be that just focusing on lucid dreaming for a week or anticipation or something was responsible,” Konkoly says. So the team conducted another experiment with 112 people.

All received lucidity-inducing sounds from the exercise while sleeping on the first night. But on the second night, the app – unbeknownst to the user – switched things up. Only 40 people heard sounds from the exercise while they slept. Another 35 got sounds they hadn’t practiced associating with lucidity. The last 37 heard no sounds.

On the first night, 17 percent of participants reported lucid dreams. On the second night, the people who heard the sounds from the exercise continued with that rate of lucid dreaming. But only 5 percent of people in the other two groups had lucid dreams — suggesting that real sound cues were indeed behind the app’s effectiveness.