In 2014, a sensational study was published by German scientists led by Ursula Voss. It claimed to have successfully induced lucid dreaming using transcranial AC stimulation. Electrical stimulation using a 40 Hz frequency current was applied during REM sleep to raise the normally slow activity of the sleeping brain to a frequency close to wakefulness.
Until recently, no one has attempted to reproduce the study’s results to corroborate the method’s effectiveness. However, in August 2020, researchers from the Dream & Nightmare Laboratory in Montreal published data from a new experiment with similar inputs to determine if a 40Hz frequency could induce dream lucidity during sleep.
Participants in the experiment were invited to a sleep laboratory, where they went through two procedures: on the first day, during daytime sleep, the technicians applied stimulation in the REM sleep phase, while on the second day, the participants slept without stimulation. Participants were then woken up and asked to share their experiences. One of the important differences from the previous experiment was the use of the method of registering lucid dreams by monitoring eye movement.
The study results were based on reports and recordings of 27 daytime AC stimulated dreams and 23 non-stimulated dreams. In the former category, 5 participants became aware of themselves in a dream, which was successfully confirmed by eye movement recordings. The latter category, however, also contained 4 lucid dreams. Thus, the experiment casts doubt on whether electrical stimulation can have an impact on the incidence of lucid dreams. Perhaps this is why not one single effective device based on this technology has yet been developed.
The research was published in magazine Consciousness and Cognition.
