A phone app could 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 seems to boost users’ odds of having lucid dreams.

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.

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

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

Researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., built and tested the app. In one experiment, 19 people used it every night for a week. 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.”

But it wasn’t completely clear that the app’s sound cues led to that increase. “It could be that just focusing on lucid dreaming for a week or expectations or something was responsible,” Konkoly says. So the 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.