WELCOME TO THE DREAM WORLD

New technology aims to help you induce a lucid dream at will, enabling you to enter a state of consciousness where anything is possible. Dare you close your eyes?

- by IAN TAYLOR

Imagine waking up to find that you're not awake at all. Your body is asleep, but your mind is running free in a dream where everything feels vivid and real and – because you know you're dreaming – you can control what happens.

In this hybrid state of consciousness, known as lucid dreaming, you can go where you want, see who you please and do the impossible. And you can feel the sensations of it, too: the wind in your hair as you fly over a city; the sun on your skin as you land on a desert island of your own design. You can sit down on the sand and smile, knowing you can do it all again tomorrow night at the simple touch of a button. If all that sounds like... well, a dream, it's one that might come true in the near future. It's certainly what a group of researchers and technologists are working towards. They're building high-tech sleep masks and other trippy brain-interface technology in the hopes of transforming lucid dreaming from a niche interest into something that all of us can do.

For the majority of people who can do it, lucid dreaming is something that happens by accident or after months, possibly years, of practice. Dream tech companies like REMspace and Prophetic are exploring ways to induce lucid dreaming at will.

Most methods of doing this involve stimulating the prefrontal cortex. That's the region of the brain found to be active during lucid dreaming and which is associated with higher-level conscious thought in the waking world. Most dream tech achieves this using some kind of signal, from simple sounds and alerts, to more complex methods using electricity, ultrasound or magnets to stimulate areas of the brain.