According to researcher Jieyin Yu, lucid dreams are a true laboratory for inner experimentation. The brain trains itself, runs simulations, and generates new versions of the self. It’s a space where familiar ideas about identity are broken down, restructured, and transformed into something new. Yu didn’t conduct experiments, however. His reflections are entirely theoretical.
Like on a stage, there are different “actors” inside the mind. These are logic, emotion, vision, and so on. In dreams, they begin to interact—arguing, cooperating, supporting one another. This gives us a powerful opportunity to understand ourselves more deeply. What matters most is the degree of internal coherence within the dream. The more aligned our sensations, thoughts, and perceptions are, the more vivid and lucid the experience becomes. The dynamic between these “actors” enables rich, multifaceted experiences, and lucidity itself arises from the brain’s spontaneous “selection” of the most fitting storyline within the dream.
Dreams help us make discoveries. During sleep, the brain finds solutions to problems that might have never occurred to the person while awake. The phenomenon known as déjà vu may also be a “hello” from the dream world—a flashback to a forgotten nighttime scene. Other ideas are also relevant here. For example, lucid dreams could serve as a training ground for artificial intelligence. The idea is to teach machines how to improvise and adapt to changing conditions just as the dreaming mind does.
What do you think of this theory?
The preprint of the article was published in June 2025 on SSRN.
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