Do you lucid dream?

Gaining popularity in the last decade, lucid dreaming is when a person knows that they are dreaming, whilst in their own dream.

With fans of the experience claiming that a person can train themselves to lucid dream, it’s no wonder that people the world over were keen to experiment with their own dream states in an attempt to reach this hallowed goal of ultimate self-awareness.

But if you thought that was the end-point for lucid dreaming (how much further, really, could we go?) you’d be sorely wrong.

And that’s because REMspace, a startup based in Redwood City, California, have recently reached new frontiers in our explorations of dreaming.

According to a recent statement, REMspace’s lucid sleeping participants have recently achieved a goal that most of us would never have even considered.

Two lucid sleepers were able to chat to one another, in their sleep.

How? Well, a lot of previous research from REMspace went into this achievement.

Firstly, the company developed special technology that a sleeping participant wore. The facial electromyography sensors on this equipment decoded the sounds that a person made in their dreams. From that point, the company constructed the dream language they named Remmyo, and tuned their sensors to decode this language.

Then came the next, and arguably most fascinating step in their experiments.

REMspace’s participants slept in their own homes, wearing the special equipment, which captured and tracked their brain waves along with other information.

The remote technology was able to sense when one of the participants had entered a lucid dream state. As soon as this occurred, a random word in the dream language Remmyo was said to the lucid dreaming participant through the earbuds he was wearing. Aware of what was happening, this participant repeated the word in this self-aware REM state, and his response was recorded.

After the next person entered a lucid dream, the technology sent the recorded message recorded in a lucid dream by the first participant to her, via her own earbuds.

When she awoke, the participant relayed the word that had been said to her during the lucid dream she experienced.

And this wasn’t a one-off, with other participants communicating through their own lucid dreams too.

Why is this important? Well, according to the statement from REMspace’s founder and CEO, Michael Reduga, this technological exploration and development of dream states could  be vital for communication, training, and even problem solving in the future:

“Yesterday, communicating in dreams seemed like science fiction. Tomorrow, it will be so common we won’t be able to imagine our lives without this technology.

This opens the door to countless commercial applications, reshaping how we think about communication and interaction in the dream world. That’s why we believe that REM sleep and related phenomena, like lucid dreams, will become the next big industry after AI.”

Though the technology isn’t developed enough – or, perhaps, desirable enough – to roll out on a grander scale yet, the scientists and engineers at REMspace have been achieving consistently high results.

Next, they’re aiming to develop the tools for lucid dreamers to converse with one another in real time, whilst in the REM stages of their sleep cycles.

Our waking lives are already so proliferated with technology, it was only a matter of time before it crept into our sleeping lives too.

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