How can I influence my dreams?
Thanks for asking! How our brains work during dreams is as fascinating as it is mysterious.
Dreams can be hard to predict and sometimes of course we end up having nightmares.
Wouldn't it be nice to have some control over what happens in our dreams?
Well as it turns out it may actually be possible to some extent.
Surely you can't just select your dream like you select a series on Netflix can you?
Well controlling dreams fully is a bit of a stretch, but according to neuroscience researchers from the universities of Freiburg and Tübingen in Germany, simply listening to an audiobook just before falling asleep is enough to have a significant impact on our dreams.
You see they believed that recent experiences in memory are reactivated when we sleep.
For example on a day when you see someone for the first time in a long time they may appear in your dream that same night.
And in July 2023 the researchers published their findings after conducting an experiment which sought to prove that through the use of audiobooks.
What did the experiment consist of?
The researchers recruited 20 participants aged between 20 and 30.
As part of the experiment those participants had one of four audiobooks played to them randomly before going to sleep.
With the selection including Ink Heart by Cornelia Funk, The Blue Train by Agatha Christie, Measuring the World by Daniel Kelman and Percy Jackson and the Olympians The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan.
The participants wore special headsets to monitor electrical activity in their brains.
They were also woken up five times during the night and questioned about their dreams.
The aim was to verify if the dreams contained information relating to the audiobook they had listened to before falling asleep.
The researchers found, unsurprisingly, that short term memory significantly and directly influenced dreams.
Three independent evaluators were able to determine which audiobook the participants had listened to before falling asleep.
Based solely on the dream fragments they mentioned, the researchers noted that during REM sleep, the phase in which we have dreams, brain activity was similar among participants who had listened to the same audiobook.
They were able to conclude that experiences from the day shaped both our brain activity and cognitive activity during sleep.
What can we learn from all this?
There's hope that the discovery could prove valuable in helping individuals suffering from mental health disorders.
A better understanding of dreams could help scientists develop therapies to treat certain mental disorders by targeting memory processing during sleep.
Talking to new scientist Deniz Kumral, one of the researchers involved in the audiobook study, said individuals with certain psychological or psychiatric conditions might benefit from tailored strategies that enhance memory processing or treat disorders of dreaming during sleep, potentially contributing to improved cognitive and emotional wellbeing.
There you have it...
Now you know how you can influence your dreams.
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