Imagine waking up to find that you're not awake at all. Your body is asleep, but your mind is running free in a dream where everything feels vivid and real and – because you know you’re dreaming – you can control what happens.
In this hybrid state of consciousness, known as lucid dreaming, you can go where you want, see who you please and do the impossible.
And you can feel the sensations of it, too: the wind in your hair as you fly over a city; the Sun on your skin as you land on a desert island of your own design.
You can sit down on the sand and smile, knowing you can do it all again tomorrow night at the simple touch of a button.
If all that sounds like… well, a dream, it’s one that might come true in the near future. It’s certainly what a group of researchers and technologists are working towards.
They’re building high-tech sleep masks and other trippy brain-interface technology in the hopes of transforming lucid dreaming from a niche interest into something that all of us can do.
For the majority of people who can do it, lucid dreaming is something that happens by accident or after months, possibly years, of practice. Dream tech companies like REMspace and Prophetic are exploring ways to induce lucid dreaming at will.
Most methods of doing this involve stimulating the prefrontal cortex. That’s the region of the brain found to be active during lucid dreaming and which is associated with higher-level conscious thought in the waking world.
Most dream tech achieves this using some kind of signal, from simple sounds and alerts, to more complex methods using electricity, ultrasound or magnets to stimulate areas of the brain.
“Maybe it looks like sci-fi right now, but believe me, in a few years it won’t,” says Michael Raduga, CEO and founder of REMSpace.
“I’m convinced that this technology is going to be the next big thing after artificial intelligence (AI) – and it will change humanity as much as AI because it’ll literally provide us with an alternative reality.”
Dreams and reality
Hearing all this, it’s difficult not to think of the Christopher Nolan movie Inception, where the protagonists enter other people’s dreams to steal information and generally look cool while they’re doing it.
But lucid dreaming isn’t a Hollywood fantasy. It’s been known about for centuries. Around half of all people are thought to have experienced the sensation of realising they’re in a dream, but few people do it often and fewer still with any real intention.
Among history’s dreamwalkers, however, are some of humanity’s brightest minds. The physicist Richard Feynman reportedly used it to explore his ideas.
So did the inventor Nikola Tesla and the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. Stephen King dabbles when working on his macabre stories, as did the artist Salvador Dalí. Nolan, too, based Inception on his own experiences with lucid dreams.
It’s also been the subject of intriguing research. Studies have shown that when people practise a simple motor skill in a lucid dream, it makes them better at performing that skill in real life.
Researchers believe it could help everybody from sportspeople to recovering stroke patients.
Brain scans of people performing this kind of dream practice, show activation of the motor cortex – the area of the brain that’s active when someone performs that same skill physically while they’re awake.
The implication is that the brain processes the lucid dream as though it were real.
Other work has looked at the therapeutic possibilities of lucid dreaming. Early research shows potential for treating nightmare disorders, insomnia, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
A pilot study in 2021 found that when insomniacs were taught lucid dreaming, most experienced significant improvements in their symptoms and sleep quality.
In another study, 85 per cent of PTSD patients experienced a decrease in symptoms after taking part in a lucid dreaming workshop.
In both cases, the results stemmed from participants being able to enter distressing dreams and consciously rewrite the narrative.
Talking in your sleep
More recently, researchers have found ways for lucid dreamers to communicate with the waking world – and even other lucid dreamers.
Last year, Raduga’s company reported that two participants exchanged a basic form of communication while dreaming.
Their brain waves and other sleep data were tracked remotely.
When a server detected that one participant had entered rapid eye movement (REM) sleep – the phase of sleep when lucid dreaming is most likely – it sent them a randomly generated word in a language developed for lucid dreaming called Remmyo.
It’s based on the movement of facial muscles.
The participant repeated the word in their dream using the same facial muscles and the response was recorded and sent to another person also having a lucid dream. When that person woke up, they were able to report the same word.
Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois have also found that people in a lucid dream can communicate with the people monitoring them, without waking up.
Dreamers were able to respond to yes-or-no questions and even solve simple maths problems using eye movements or sniff signals, measured via a small tube under their nose.
“These are small signals, not full sentences, but it shows people are capable of responding in dreams in real time and using their working memory,” says study author Prof Ken Paller.
“There’s a team in Germany, however, that’s keen on having people use their eye movements to look at a virtual keyboard in their dream and spell out things with their eyes.”
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Dream tech
To help people achieve lucidity in their dreams, Paller uses a technique called Targeted Lucidity Reactivation (TLR).
This combines pre-sleep training, which teaches you to be aware of your surroundings and emotional state in a dream, with sensory cues like sounds that repeat before and during sleep.
In one study, Paller’s team showed that TLR could work with a simple smartphone app: people who used it more than doubled the number of lucid dreams they had in a week.
It’s a low-tech way of inducing lucid dreams, and one that also works in the products Raduga has developed at REMspace.
The company’s app and sleep mask, both called LucidMe, send signals during sleep in the form of sounds, lights and vibrations. LucidMe also features sleep tracking and dream journaling.
Raduga says this technology can help people increase the volume of their lucid dreams, but that it still requires a lot of effort on the part of the dreamer.
“It can be a little bit frustrating; you have to invest a lot of time to experience it,” he says. “And sometimes it doesn’t work.”
The next generation of the sleep mask will make it much easier to lucid dream, Raduga says, but he isn’t ready to reveal details yet.
Ultimately, he believes technology will give us the ability to hack our dreams at will – and he’s already gone to extreme lengths to try it. In 2023, Raduga performed neurosurgery on himself, drilling a hole into his skull to insert electrodes in his brain.
He trained himself for the surgery by watching videos on YouTube and practising on sheep heads. Once he felt confident enough to go ahead, he set up a complex array of mirrors and screens to perform the four-hour procedure.
He was in Kazakhstan at the time, after being forced to leave his research lab in Russia when the war in Ukraine began.
“I was desperate,” he admits. “I lost all my resources, lost everything in my life.”
Obviously, this is not something anyone should try at home, as the consequences could be fatal. As for Raduga, he was hospitalised due to loss of blood, but the electrodes he’d inserted into his head worked, for a few weeks (they were removed – not by him – about a month later).
“We found that we could send hundreds of signals into my dream world without waking me up,” he says.
“So it means that if we develop a technology that sends signals into the dream world directly, we can wake up people in their dreams directly, without sounds, lights and so on.
“That crazy experiment has saved us years. Because now we know what to do.”
The need for caution
Raduga has a LucidMe app and mask on the market now, but is already working on more advanced neuromodulation technology. He envisions a future where a dreamer’s brain is stimulated easily and painlessly by electricity, magnetic fields or ultrasound.
It’s tempting to dismiss Raduga as a reckless maverick – a dreamer, you might say – but he’s not the only one.
Neuromodulation is a growing research field with scientists investigating its use as a potential therapy for chronic pain, epilepsy, psychiatric conditions and more.
For lucid dreaming specifically, the datasets are small and, because it doesn’t happen every night, the results are often patchy. Studies looking at different types of electrical stimulation, for example, have shown inconclusive results.
There are also questions about how quickly this technology should make its way into the mainstream. Regulatory bodies can’t keep up with the pace at which neuromodulation is advancing and it’s raising questions around safety and accuracy.
Our understanding of the underlying neuroscience of lucid dreams is still developing, Paller says. But even if we’re targeting the right areas of the brain, can we be sure we’re always hitting them?
“If you’re doing electrical stimulation, for example, the electricity is flowing all over your head, inside your brain and out,” Paller says.
“It’s really small currents, and not oscillating in a way that would produce an epileptic seizure or something, but there are these small risks.”
There are also rare cases of people having bad experiences while lucid dreaming. “Some people have lucid nightmares that they can’t wake themselves up from,” Paller says. “That’s very frightening because then you’re stuck in it.”
Researchers have warned that lucid dreaming is unsuitable for people with schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders, because it can exacerbate their symptoms.
“If someone has dissociative tendencies [which can compromise their perception of time, their memory or their identity] in their waking state, it’s maybe not best for them to do it,” Paller says.
He believes that while some of the start-ups in this field are more willing than he is to make claims about the technology, he’s still glad they’re doing the work.
That’s because it will ultimately speed up our understanding of lucid dreams and their potential. “As a neuroscientist, there’s a lot we can learn through these other methods.”
One of those companies is Prophetic, a New York-based start-up that’s working on a headband designed to increase lucid dreaming.
Called the Halo, you’d wear the device to bed, and it uses an electroencephalogram – a non-invasive technique to measure electrical activity in the brain – to register when you drop into REM sleep.
Then, the device emits a beam of ultrasound targeted at the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, one of the brain regions thought to be active during lucid dreams.
“It’s very precise in terms of its effect space, so that’s part of the appeal,” says Prophetic founder Eric Wollberg.
“But people have also done surveys on what sounds more appealing or more scary, in terms of these different neuromodulation techniques. With ultrasound, people think about a sonogram on a mother’s womb.
"I’m not electroshocking my brain.”
In the short term, Wollberg is thinking about how many headbands he can sell. “If you can build a device that induces lucid dreaming, it’s just a very compelling offer,” he says.
“I think people are going to do this because it’s fun: you can do things like fly. It’s just a hedonically pleasurable experience.”
But he’s also looking ahead and looking deeper. Wohlberg thinks lucid dreaming is much more than a playground, or even a clinic. He sees the dream world as a laboratory.
“I consider lucid dreaming a particle accelerator for consciousness,” he says.
Decoding consciousness
Could lucid dreaming really help us understand consciousness, one of the deepest mysteries of the Universe? It’s not out of the question, Paller says.
“If you’re in the waking state, most people think your consciousness is giving you a readout of what’s in the world.
"You look around, you see the world and your brain has this sophisticated ability to take in all this input and read out what’s out there. If you think about dreams, well, actually, your brain has that capability even without any sensory input.”
Which rather begs the question: cutting-edge headset or not, how do you know you’re not dreaming right now?
The dreamers
Lucid dreaming cured my sleep paralysis, John Mahood, designer
“I used to get sleep paralysis in my late 20s. I couldn’t speak or move and because you can’t process time properly in a dream, it felt like I was there for ages. I spoke to a neurosurgeon I know, who told me lucid dreaming might help.
"It took practice, but I found that if I read about lucid dreaming before going to bed, I was more likely to have one. I found I could sort of throw myself out of my body, so I’d go downstairs and sit in the living room instead of feeling trapped in my own body.”
I teach people how to lucid dream, Jade Shaw, coach
“Lucid dreams are a kind of platform for having an out-of-body experience and I help people do that. It can give you a decreased fear of death, make you more empathic.
"It can be quite transformative for people – deeper than therapy, deeper than hypnotherapy – because you’re doing that work in the unconscious mind. The results can be similar to doing psychedelics and impact people’s belief systems.
"It can also just be fun: the best cake I ever ate was one I had in a lucid dream.”
I use lucid dreams as a creative tool, Ben J Henry, author
“My lucid dreams started by accident while I was at university, but now I use them creatively. As a writer, it’s really useful for meeting the characters in my stories.
"For instance, I had a character who was an artist and got them to paint something in a lucid dream. Or I might be designing a landscape in a fantasy story.
"It’s fascinating because you don’t know what you’re going to be presented with: my subconscious is directing this without my conscious knowing. It’s very exciting.”
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