Since ancient times, human beings have devoted great enthusiasm to dreams, but no matter ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign, dreams have always been a mystery that is difficult to solve. In uncivilized primitive society, dreams are often regarded as instructions from God or the devil. Even in modern civilized society, there are still many superstitions about dreams. Because of its mystery, dreams provide people with a broad imagination space, and literary works with dreams as the theme emerge one after another. In the movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio plays a "dreamer" who can sneak into the sleeper's subconscious and manipulate his dreams. In ancient China, there were many legends about punishing evil and promoting good by controlling other people's dreams. But these are fictional works after all. In real life, can our dreams really be manipulated by others?

Primitive "dream machine"

People have been trying to manipulate dreams for a long time. /kloc-Draven, a French aristocrat 0/50 years ago, was one of the first people to study dreams. He took his own experience as an example to prove that dreams can be planned in advance. He used the same perfume every day during his trip to the south of France. A few months later, he arranged for his servant to sprinkle this perfume on his pillow for several nights at will. Unsurprisingly, on those nights when perfume is sprayed, the scenes on the journey are more likely to enter his dreams. Although this is a pioneering work, his research is mainly a kind of self-experience rather than a scientific experiment in a strict sense.

From 65438 to 0899, American psychologist James Leonard Corning invented a "dream machine" to study dreams in a more systematic way. He invited the subjects to lie on the sofa and wear leather helmets. There are two metal disks on the helmet, which are fixed on the subjects' ears respectively. The disks are connected with the nearby phonograph through a long rubber tube. At night, this special device will spread all kinds of classical music to the ears of the subjects. Corning said that this device can help those who suffer from nightmares. He described a case in which after using the device for a period of time, the subject's dream changed from a "terrible carnival" to a "happy vision". In another case, the device cured a woman's depression.

Corning's research is far beyond his time. But Corning has no way to know when the subjects are dreaming, so it is difficult to play music only when they are dreaming. Confronted with this insurmountable challenge, Corning finally lost interest.

"Outside-in" integration

In the 1950s, Eugene Aselinski of the University of Chicago discovered REM sleep, that is, the eyes move rapidly in the eye socket, while the rest of the body is almost completely paralyzed. The recording results of electrodes placed on the scalp show that there is intensive nerve activity at this stage. During REM sleep, Arthur Linsky wakes up the subjects at any time, and almost all the subjects say that they are dreaming. Arthur Linsky's research results show that researchers can get dream reports when they wake up the subjects at this stage. His research has created a milestone in sleep science and rekindled people's interest in dream control.

In the early 1960s, William Dement, a sleep scientist at Stanford University, invited subjects into the laboratory. After the subjects fell into REM sleep, Dement played music in their ears, illuminated their faces with strong light or sprinkled water on them. After waiting for a few minutes, Dement's dinner bell woke up the subjects and asked them to describe their dreams.

About half of the subjects reported that they incorporated external stimuli into their dreams, such as sprinkling water to make them dream of sudden rain, sound triggering the explosion scene in their dreams, and bright light stimuli showing the sudden fire in their dreams. Although the experimental results are accurate, researchers have no way to use these technologies outside the laboratory, which reduces their interest in controlling their dreams again.

Music permeates dreams.

A few years ago, richard wiseman, a British psychologist, realized that smartphones could detect a large number of dream control samples. So Wiseman contacted an application software company and asked them to design a mobile phone application to control dreams.

The experiment designed by Wiseman is very simple. Before going to bed, the subjects set an alarm clock on their smartphones and chose specially prepared background music, such as music describing country walks, which can hear the rustling of breeze through the jungle, and music with the theme of seaside holiday can hear the sound of waves lapping on the coast. Then, the subjects put their smartphones on the bed to sleep.

The working time of this application is the last active sleep in the sleep cycle. About 30 minutes before the alarm goes off, the gravity sensor in the smartphone is activated to measure the shaking of the mattress when the subject turns over during sleep. When the mobile phone detects that the subject is no longer active, it means that the body has entered a state of paralysis, that is, rapid eye movement sleep occurs, and the application program begins to play the selected background music softly. The subjects reported the contents of the dream immediately after waking up.

This application was officially launched on 20 12, and has been downloaded about 500,000 times. Wiseman's research team has collected dream reports from tens of thousands of people, and this huge sample is very helpful for dream research. Consistent with the previous research results, Wiseman also found that the background music chosen by the subjects was related to the dreams that followed: if the music set in the countryside was chosen, green leaves, flowers and grass were more likely to appear in the dreams; If you choose music with the beach as the background, you are more likely to dream of driving to the beach and suddenly feel the sun shining on your skin.

However, are these results enough to prove that external conditions can affect people's dreams? There is a view that it is not the music that subjects hear during their dreams that affects their dreams. In fact, when they choose background music, they already have certain expectations for the content of their dreams. To test this possibility, the researchers adjusted the application. Sometimes, although the subjects selected some background music, the application didn't play it after a predetermined time. Even so, many people still dream about the scenes in the background music they choose. This seems to indicate that suggestion plays an important role in the process of determining dreams. Although the exact mechanism of controlling dreams remains to be further confirmed, at least it is certain that psychologists can help people decide the content of dreams.

Psychotherapist in the dark

What is exciting is that Wiseman's research work can help people to be emotionally stable when they are awake. About 80% of dreams involve some degree of anxiety. Most sleep scientists believe that the brain designs these negative scenes not to intimidate people, but to help people correctly handle the things they care about and worry about every day. In other words, dreams are our "night therapists". Some researchers believe that after experiencing some negative events repeatedly, the influence of negative emotions on individuals will weaken. They infer from this that dreaming of negative events may help to alleviate psychological trauma. Some researchers believe that recreating the past through dreaming can stimulate similar emotional events and help to deal with current emotional troubles.

All the above theories predict that the first dreams that appear every night tend to focus on people's anxiety. After repeated many times, the influence of these emotions will gradually decrease, thus creating a calm dream and making people wake up in a better mood. This model has been confirmed by rosalind Cartwright of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, USA.

The theory of "night therapist" also puts forward an interesting view on the relationship between dreams and depression. Sleep scientists have known that the dreams of depressed patients are usually long and repetitive, and most of them are negative plots, which leads to patients often feeling depressed after waking up. The theory of "night therapist" holds that the unusual dream pattern of depressed patients comes from the brain trying to speed up the processing of their anxiety and worry during sleep. Cartwright monitored the dreams of patients suffering from depression due to divorce. She found that people with more and more positive emotions in their dreams are more likely to recover from depression after one year; Those who feel increasingly anxious in their dreams are more likely to continue to show depressive symptoms.

Since it is feasible to change the content and emotional tone of dreams, can we help people overcome anxiety and depression in this way? This idea has very realistic clinical significance. As early as 100 years ago, Koning speculated that his "dream machine" could help people change their lives. Now with the development of science, it is time to prove whether his idea is correct.

(Author: Wang, Zhao Zhongxin; Via science pictorial)