Science News shares an app created by Northwestern University neuroscientists that’s designed to cue your almost-sleeping brain to launch you into a lucid dream:
Before bed, the app has users listen to a specific sound, such as a series of beeps, and practice associating that cue with a keen awareness of their thoughts and body. When the app plays that sound again six hours later, it’s meant to reactivate that self-awareness in the sleeping user, coaxing them to become lucid mid-dream.
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Researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., built and tested the app. In one experiment, 19 people used it every night for a week. During the previous week, the group reported an average 0.74 lucid dreams. During the week of app use, that ramped up to an average 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 a lot.”
…[T]he team ran another experiment with 112 people.
Everyone got lucidity-triggering sounds from training while they slept the first night. But on the second night, the app — unbeknownst to the users — switched things up. Only 40 people heard sounds from training while they slept. Another 35 got sounds they had not practiced linking to lucidity. The final 37 heard no sounds.
The first night, 17 percent of participants reported lucid dreams. The second night, people who heard the sounds from training kept up that rate of lucid dreaming. But only 5 percent of the people in the other two groups had lucid dreams — hinting that the real sound cues were indeed behind the app’s effectiveness.
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You can read more of the lucid dream app research here, in Consciousness and Cognition.