In the Roald Dahl book The BFG, a “Big Friendly Giant” spends his time blowing happy dreams into children that he has collected from Dream Country. In modern neuroscience labs, some researchers are now working to “blow” dreams into people, collecting them via high-tech ”Dream Country” of sorts: virtual reality (VR). They are using VR to create experiences while people are awake that they hope can then influence their sleeping lives and in turn feed back into their waking lives in a positive way.
“If dreams can amplify certain aspects of our waking moments, we can then create experiences surrounding the very values, emotions, or concepts that we may want to amplify when we are dreaming,” says Blaise Elliott, who presented this work in a poster at CNS 2024 in Toronto. “Using this technology as a tool to enhance our relationship with dreaming may allow us to also enhance our relationship with different aspects of ourselves, experiences, and ultimately the world around us.”
Working in Ken Paller’s cognitive neuroscience lab at Northwestern University, Elliott and colleagues are building on past work that aims to understand and manipulate sleep in novel ways. In their studies, VR is one tool that is enabling them to train participants in lucid dreaming, which can enable people to take more control over their dreams. I spoke with Elliott about this latest work presented at CNS 2024 and its significance, as well as what he sees as the future of dream research.
CNS: What got you each first interested in studying dreams?
Elliott: Interesting enough, it was art! The film Inception, produced by Christopher Nolan, inspired me during my senior year of high school to want to study the cognitive sciences due to the plot’s engagement with the intricacy of human cognition and its contributions toward creating our perceptual realities. The film shifted my curiosity about what may be possible. I was intrigued by the plot’s notion that an idea can possibly be implanted and thus amplified by using dreaming as a tool.
Dreaming is so mysterious, but also pretty enlightening. It is a world that infuses a variety of worlds, both conscious and unconscious experiences as well as internal and external experiences that may uniquely speak to you and you only. In essence, dreaming seemed like a gateway to understanding ourselves and our own conceptions of the world in an infinitely expansive way. How beautiful.
CNS: What makes virtual reality a promising technology for exploring dreams?
Elliott: Many of our dreams are impacted or influenced by our waking moments, particularly waking moments that are deeply resonating. The promising thing about virtual reality is that we have the opportunity to control particular periods of our waking moments by intentionally creating the experiences we want to create, most especially experiences that may not be accessible to us in our day to day lives.
CNS: What were you most excited to find in your research?
Elliott: We successfully had 4 out of 5 of our participants specifically had lucid dreams about a previous and resonating VR experience! It was exciting to see that a VR program, shown to have ego attenuating [reducing ego to increase a sense of connectedness] effects, robustly influence our participants’ dream content. What I’m most surprised about however, is that our participants mentioned that this influenced their subsequent waking moments after dreaming.
CNS: What do you each see as the future of dream research?
Elliott: It would be lovely to witness dream research tackling how dream content may influence our relationship to the future, how we may behaviorally develop in the future, or what we may anticipate about the future. The “future” as a concept can be fragile, as how we conceptualize the future is often a reflection of current events. However, I think that is why it is so important. People have admitted to anticipating future events in their dreams, and I can’t help but to think about how that may further influence their development and their understanding of the present. It could lead to new ways in how we understand identity development and so much more.
CNS: What did you think of CNS 2024?
Elliott: It was my first time at CNS, and I thought it was beautiful. Everybody has a different way of expressing their interests and passions. Witnessing so many people express their excitement in ways that were unique to them was a great reminder that there isn’t one way to be a scientist, or one way to think about and express concepts.
-Lisa M.P. Munoz
