Whenever you occur to must desire to comprise a dream where you’re dreaming, you may perchance presumably well honest be in excellent fortune. A cell phone app appears to be like to be to steal users’ odds of having lucid needs.

Earlier than mattress, the app has users listen to a explicit sound, akin to a chain of beeps, and apply associating that cue with a eager awareness of their solutions and physique. When the app plays that sound over again six hours later, it’s intended to reactivate that self-awareness in the drowsing particular person, coaxing them to turn into lucid mid-dream.

About a of these sensory cues comprise proved comparatively efficient for inducing lucid needs in sleep studies. However a researcher on the total tracks somebody’s sleep to play sounds at some stage in the REM stage, when lucid needs are in all likelihood. New experiments now roar that a rough approximation of the technique the exercise of an app can promote lucid dreaming at dwelling, researchers narrative in the October Consciousness and Cognition.

This DIY methodology may perchance presumably aid extra of us comprise lucid needs for sport or study on the nature of consciousness (SN: 8/27/23).

Researchers at Northwestern College in Evanston, Sick., constructed and tested the app. In a single experiment, 19 of us aged it every evening for a week. During the old week, the community reported a median 0.74 lucid needs. During the week of app exercise, that ramped up to a median 2.11 lucid needs. “That’s a terribly enormous elevate for lucid dreaming,” says Northwestern cognitive neuroscientist Karen Konkoly. “Lucid dreaming as soon as a week is a lot.”

However it indubitably wasn’t fully determined that the app’s sound cues resulted in that elevate. “It will most likely presumably well very successfully be that factual specializing in lucid dreaming for a week or expectations or one thing became to blame,” Konkoly says. So the personnel ran one more experiment with 112 of us.

All individuals got lucidity-triggering sounds from coaching whereas they slept the major evening. However on the second evening, the app — unbeknownst to the users — switched things up. Perfect 40 of us heard sounds from coaching whereas they slept. Any other 35 got sounds they had not practiced linking to lucidity. The final 37 heard no sounds.

The first evening, 17 percent of contributors reported lucid needs. The second evening, these who heard the sounds from coaching kept up that rate of lucid dreaming. However exclusively 5 percent of the of us in the diversified two groups had lucid needs — hinting that the proper sound cues were indeed on the abet of the app’s effectiveness.