For the last three weeks, we’ve been studying lucid dreaming – the state of consciousness that allows a sleeper to recognise that they’re sleeping and control their experiences. Click on the link for access to each newsletter.
The fourth and final part to the series opens with a 2018 study in Nature looking for evidence that the frequency of lucid dreaming (LD) was related to functional connectivity of the brain’s anterior prefrontal cortex (aPFC), as has been suggested in prior research including the SLEEP study discussed last Monday.
Led by Benjamin Baird, of the Wisconsin Institute for Sleep and Consciousness based at the University of Wisconsin, the team recruited what they called an “exceptional sample” of 14 lucid dreamers who had lucid dreams at least every other night.
To put that into societal context, an estimated 40 to 50 per cent of people never have a lucid dream, about 20 per cent have them monthly, to the “small percentage” who have them weekly – or even nightly (about 0.1 per cent). That raised the question: do such frequent dreamers have differences in their brain’s anatomy? Or do their brains function differently?
The research team matched the fabulous 14 (FF) for age, gender and dream recall with a control group who had less than one lucid dream per week, and measured everyone’s brain activity in the whirring, clanking, bad techno hell of a MRI machine.
The aPFC was of interest due to growing evidence suggesting its crucial anatomical role in metacognition – knowing that you know something, in this case being aware that you’re dreaming. (This can be taught – see the second page of this link for more information.)
Their results showed that the difference between LD and normal REM sleep was linked not to anatomy, but brain function while awake. Increased functional integrity between the aPFC and the region where the tempero and parietal lobes meet – regions suppressed in REM sleep but activated in LD – is associated with higher rates of LD. (One person had multiple such dreams each night.)
The authors suggest a hypothesis based on the claim that the higher-order consciousness needed to know that you’re in a dream is thought to depend on the “linguistic abilities that separate humans from other species”. Their “speculative proposal” is that the LD network identified “may” be part of the neural circuitry integrating the metacognitive and linguistic networks.
But “much of the cognitive neuroscience literature” regarding the temperoparietal region “lacks anatomical specificity”.
Limitations? They had a few, including not being able to subjectively record lucid dreams, but rather rely on self-reported figures.
I’d hoped to be able to track down more information about a 2014 study in which 13 people invited to incubate kundalini energy while in a lucid dream, but it’s in a book, so the summary in this paper will have to suffice.
Ten participants were successful in experiencing kundalini in the lucid dream state. For some, the kundalini experience even extended into the waking tsate. Most felt kundalini to be the Divine, and five participants experienced non-duality, also feeling that in some way their experiences were connected to ultimate reality. Three-month and one-year follow-up interviews with the participants revealed that these experiences influenced a deeper sense of psycho-spiritual wellbeing in them.
Bonus clip
Horse plus squeaky chicken
Next week: Is EEG activity in paired meditators different from individuals?