Investigating consciousness in the sleep laboratory – an interdisciplinary perspective on lucid dreaming

ABSTRACT

During dreaming, we experience a wake-like hallucinatory reality, however with restricted reflective abilities: in the face of a bizarre dream environment, we do not realize that we are actually dreaming. In contrast, during the rare phenomenon of lucid dreaming, the dreamer gains insight into the current state of mind while staying asleep. This metacognitive insight often enables the dreamer to control own dream actions and the course of the dream narrative. Lucid dreaming allows for radically new methodological and theoretical approaches and has led to new insights in diverse scientific disciplines beyond classical sleep and dream research, including neuroscience, psychotherapy, philosophy, art, and sports sciences. Here, we review past research and the current knowledge on lucid dreaming. We present insights into the scientific work in a sleep laboratory and describe how lucid dreams can be induced through methodologies from diverse academic backgrounds including psychology, electrical engineering and pharmacology.

KEYWORDS:

• Sleep
• EEG
• lucid dreaming
• cognition
• metacognition
• consciousness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Kristoffer Appel is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Cognitive Science at Osnabrück University, Germany. He received a bachelor’s degree in computer science and business management in 2011, and a master’s degree in cognitive science in 2013, with specializations in neuroinformatics and neuroscience. He worked as a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in 2015 and 2016, and built up an own sleep research group, including a polysomnographic research laboratory in Osnabrück. In his PhD studies, he is investigating how complex sleep laboratory experiments can be conducted in an automatized fashion in a home setting.

Prof. Dr Gordon Pipa has been the head of neuroinformatics research group at Osnabrück University since 2010, a position he received at the age of 36. He holds six international patents and has published more than 60 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Recently, he became a referee of the European Flagship ‘The Human Brain Project’ and is a member of the science mediation team. He has received several awards for teaching and scientific achievements. He holds a diploma in theoretical physics, a PhD in computer science and a habilitation in biology, reflecting his broad interdisciplinary background.

Martin Dresler is Assistant Professor for Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud University Medical Centre and Donders Institute in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He received master’s degrees in psychology and philosophy from Ruhr University Bochum and a PhD from Philipps University Marburg. He has carried out postdoctoral research on sleep, dreams, and memory function at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, Oxford University, and Stanford University.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the Andrea von Braun Foundation.