‘Dream engineers’ help people to reshape unpleasant or frightening nightmares and potentially improve their health in the process. Photo / 123rf
Learning how to have more lucidity and agency while you sleep can help fix anxiety, trauma and chronic pain, says one dream engineer.
When Michelle Carr was a postdoctoral researcher at Swansea University, she would cycle down a long, dark stretch of the Welsh coastline every morning in a race to beat the sunrise. Waiting for her at 7.30am sharp, in a stout little building nestled in Swansea Bay, was a revolving cast of volunteers, whose dreams Carr was preparing to manipulate.
She would watch from the control room as they slept with electrodes attached to their heads, for the signs that they had entered REM sleep, the brief window where vivid dreaming is most likely to occur.
“Play the cue!” Carr whispered excitedly the first time she spotted a participant’s eyes moving around under their eyelids. Another researcher hit a button, playing a set of three beeps into the test subject’s room. Then they watched as the random eye movements transformed into intentional glances left and right.
One of the women was sound asleep but aware that she was dreaming and was speaking back to the researchers from inside her dream – an example of what’s known as “lucid dreaming”, and a crucial part of Carr’s field of study. “It’s really cool to see those worlds collide within the lab,” she says. “You have no idea what they’re dreaming about, but you also know that they’re aware of the fact that they’re in the sleep lab, that they’re in this experiment, and they’re communicating directly to you.”
That morning, Carr’s test subject had dreamt that she was eating dinner with her family when three beeps interrupted their conversation. Carr had told her subject that this would be her signal, so she realised that she was dreaming and regained control of her eyes, looking left and right around the room. She also found that she was able to transform a fraught conversation with her parents about a recent death in their family into cheerful chit-chat.
That is the work of the “dream engineer”, as Carr’s strange job title goes: to help people shape their own dreams and think themselves out of unpleasant or frightening visions and into scenes that are pleasant, psychologically powerful, or just happily absurd – and potentially improve their health in the process.
Most of us have the instinctive belief that our dreams are important in some mystical way. The ancient Greeks believed that dreams were divine messages sent straight from the gods. The Egyptians made the interpretation of dreams into a science, with doctors carrying handbooks that helped them to analyse patients’ visions, in order to diagnose different diseases.
The study of dreams as we think of it starts with the work of 19th-century psychoanalysts in Europe, such as Sigmund Freud, who famously made a habit of reading dark desires into their patients’ nighttime visions. The work of Freud and his peers looms large over Carr’s work and has cast an unscientific shadow over the entire field of modern dream science. To this day, she says, her colleagues skirt around the word “dreaming” itself, and reach for less “stigmatised” terms such as “sleep perception” or plain “consciousness” instead.
The world’s first modern sleep laboratories opened in America in the 1960s. The work carried out in them has led scientists to propose that dreams serve an evolutionary purpose, helping us sort through and consolidate important memories and abandon useless ones, while preparing us for problems we might face in the waking world.
The research from those labs also revealed that more than 70% of us have had the most typical dream experiences: being chased, falling, or trying and failing over and over again to complete the same task. Our dreams tend to belong to one of just 40 different themes because they are crafted primarily from the activities that take up the majority of our waking lives, Carr explains. Interruptions from the physical world intrude on our dreams and are translated by the brain in the oddest of ways, too. Grinding your teeth in the night prompts dreams of lost teeth, just as a full bladder sets your dream self on an endless quest for the nearest bathroom.
But the qualities of our dreams themselves have never factored into that research very much. Looking at dreams up close is still something of a maverick practice, carried out by only a few dozen experimental researchers around the world, such as Carr. Studying the dreaming mind first-hand has shown her that “there’s something incredible going on when we sleep – that the brain can be conscious in its sleeping state as much as it is while you’re awake”.
Carr, 37, is now the director of the world’s only dream-engineering laboratory, at the University of Montreal, where she is an assistant professor. She not only studies how dreams can be shaped, but also how to put dream engineering to use to improve our lives in the waking world. Helping people to have more control over the content of their dreams through lucid dreaming is the basis of her work, and is the key to using dreams to our benefit.
Some 80% of us have had a lucid dream at some point in our lives, and some of us are naturally more skilled at it than others. Frequent lucid dreamers tend to have an “internal locus of control”, or the belief that they are in control of their lives, says Carr. “But anyone can be taught how to have more lucidity and agency in their dreams,” and even a little bit “can improve waking mood”.
Carr first realised that dreams could be controlled when she was an undergraduate psychology student and she experienced sleep paralysis, a terrifying phenomenon where someone finds themselves unable to move or speak as they’re waking up or falling asleep. It often comes with visions of a demon or a ghost. “It’s really only a minute long, but for me, I would have really terrifying experiences of feeling like there was some demon or threatening presence in the room,” Carr recalls.
It’s common for those in sleep paralysis to try to force themselves awake, and to feel terrified in their frozen bodies. “I learnt how to have lucid dreams, and I actually used these to overcome sleep paralysis and nightmares,” says Carr. She realised that she could stay calm when faced with a demon and slip into a happier dream instead.
She was also keenly aware that nightmares can have disastrous effects on our health. Experiencing frequent nightmares can increase our risk of cardiovascular disease, leave us fatigued, and is also the single biggest risk factor for suicide in people who have experienced trauma. According to recent research from Imperial College London, having nightmares on a weekly basis can accelerate ageing and raise your risk of an early death three times over. For Carr, overcoming sleep paralysis herself “really made me want to know more about dreams, and how to stop nightmares in particular”.
More than eight in 10 of us have a nightmare at least once a year. The brain “can’t distinguish between what happens in a dream from what happens in real life”, Carr says, so when they happen, our hearts race and our breathing becomes panicked, and the activity in our amygdalas – the brain’s emotional centre – is identical to the brain’s response when we are under threat in the daytime. We wake with a start in the night as our fight-or-flight response is triggered by a terrifying event that is every bit as real as a real-world trauma. Bad dreams, on the other hand, come without the same dramatic ending, and do not affect our health so severely.
A crucial function of dreaming is to help us make sense of the world and integrate difficult experiences into our understanding of it. When someone experiences a trauma, the brain’s efforts to process the world can falter, Carr explains, meaning we can become “stuck” in a memory or feeling.
It’s unsurprising, then, that nightmares are a defining symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which is considered extremely difficult to treat. Less than 50% of people diagnosed with this illness make a recovery after treatment on the NHS.
Some dream-engineering studies, meanwhile, show a 100% success rate in bringing participants with PTSD back below the diagnostic threshold for the condition. One such experiment saw a woman with PTSD use lucid dreaming to meet and “befriend” her anxiety, which appeared to her as “a giant golden lozenge”. A week later, her regular nightmares were gone, and her waking symptoms had improved dramatically too.
Teaching people how to have lucid dreams could also be a potential cure for chronic pain. Nightmares are experienced at least once a month by almost half of people with chronic pain, and around a third experience pain in their dreams, too. Carr points to a case report from a colleague, which tells the story of a man who had dreamt of hearing a “euphorically beautiful” tone. It left him with the sense that his brain “had shut down and been rebooted”. When he woke, the disabling chronic pain he had experienced for decades had vanished.
It’s time for the medical world to ditch the standpoint that dreams are an untouchable and unimportant phenomenon, Carr believes. “Most people who suffer from nightmares don’t seek help or get help for them, and they might not report them,” she says. “It’s very rare for healthcare practitioners to know how to deal with nightmares, so they’re kind of ignored. If there was a movement to pay attention to nightmares and treat them, then I think that would be a really important update.”
Whether you have frequent nightmares, or experience them only once in a blue moon, developing the ability to lucid-dream can prevent them from impacting on your health. Carr once worked with a test subject who had had terrifying nightmares about being trapped in a room full of ravenous tigers, with a door to her back that she could never manage to escape out of. Carr told her to imagine the room vividly while she was awake, and to picture a different ending to the story, as well as to imagine that she was one of the tigers, to understand how they felt. The woman realised that the tigers in her dream were just as scared as she was. When her nightmare came later that evening, she used her lucid-dreaming abilities – taught to her by Carr – to open the door and let the tigers run free. She felt a deep sense of peace, and the tigers never bothered her again.
Being able to lucid-dream can come with greater benefits still. Elite sportsmen and musicians can bend their dreams to their benefit, using lucid dreaming to practise swimming through jelly or performing in front of a crowd. When they wake, a form of “implicit learning” has taken place, leaving them with strengthened muscle memory each morning and a competitive edge.
There is still much more to understand about the strange world of the nocturnal mind. Technological advances coming fast around the corner, such as AI programmes that can predict the content of a test subject’s dreams from the patterns of their brain waves, mean that researchers such as Carr could one day study dreams as they unfold. She still wonders “why we have to experience dreams”, rather than the brain simply processing information unconsciously while we sleep; whether we will ever know exactly how the brain puts them together. Thanks to her work, we are closer than ever to the answers.
Having a lucid dream can improve your health and boost your happiness – it’s a way to have fun while you sleep, after all. But lucid dreams are also the most powerful tool you can use to end sleep paralysis or rewrite your nightmares. Here is how to do it at home:
Into the Dream Lab: The New Science of Dreams and Nightmares, by Dr Michelle Carr, is out on December 2.