This is amazing, underwhelming and not very surprising, all at the same time.
Unsurprising, as it was already known that lucid dreamers can move their eyes... And I think everyone has experienced external stimuli, say an alarm clock, being seamlessly integrated into a dream.
Underwhelming, as this requires people with rare skills and special requirement to achieve just 18% success rate. For a basic task.
Amazing, because obviously the first time something is achieved with rigor, it's opening some hard to predict room to grow. Hopefully this will bring more research and any decade now we'll see practical applications, say dream manipulation to said psychotherapy.
On integrating outside stimuli, what I’ve always wondered is how wall clock time relates to time in the dream world.
I have a vivid memory of a dream as a kid where I was a fighter pilot, went through a bunch of dream time as a kid’s idea of what fighter pilots did, was eventually shot down/ejected over water and condemned to drown in the dream. I woke up with my mouth stuffed full of my own blanket to the point which was making mouth breathing almost impossible.
Did I start ingesting the blanket and concoct and experience a long dreamtime dream in 3 minutes? Or did the dream take 45+ minutes and I started ingesting the blanket midway through?
This was probably 40 years ago and I can remember it like it was last week.
Maybe I should simplify my question. If my alarm starts ringing at 7:00:00 and this is an instance where that stimulus will be incorporated into a dream which started slightly earlier, can the dream be 4 hours long in dream time, ending with the alarm stimulus, if the dream started at 6:58? Or is there a much smaller (or larger) time dilation possible?
Does the brain speed up to quickly get to a scenario where that alarm sound is plausibly part of the dream world? If I started dreaming 1 second before the alarm, what’s the most complex dream I could experience that ended with an alarm sound?
The brain and dreams are fascinating to me, which is pleasingly meta.
I can confirm this. I literally had zero natural aptitude for dreams and when prior to achieving my first consciously induced lucid dream, thought for a long time that I stopped having dreams (in reality I just was not recalling them).
Unsurprising, as it was already known that lucid dreamers can move their eyes... And I think everyone has experienced external stimuli, say an alarm clock, being seamlessly integrated into a dream.
Underwhelming, as this requires people with rare skills and special requirement to achieve just 18% success rate. For a basic task.
Amazing, because obviously the first time something is achieved with rigor, it's opening some hard to predict room to grow. Hopefully this will bring more research and any decade now we'll see practical applications, say dream manipulation to said psychotherapy.