The scientific method of registration of lucid dreams – based on instructing dreamers to move their eyes in a dream at the moment of awareness – was first applied in the late 1970s. However, a new study by the Brazilian scientist Sergio Arthuro Mota-Rolim from the Institute of the Brain of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Natal is now asking whether this method is sufficiently reliable in assessing lucid dreaming.
The connection between eye movements during sleep and subsequent visual images occurring during REM sleep was noticed by scientists back in the 1950s. A little later, a “scanning hypothesis” was put forward, in which it was noted that eye movements during sleep are controlled by dream images, similar to how, during wakefulness, the eyes move toward the objects a person is looking at.
Thus, the technique of eye movement during REM sleep was developed, thanks to which scientists have standardized the procedure for registering the presence of lucid dreams in laboratory conditions. However, more and more studies are now disputing this fact.
The biggest question for scientists is the physiological ability to move the eyes consciously during sleep. Also, not all REM eye movements are the result of tracking dream images. In fact, many scientists believe that eye movement during REM sleep is caused by several factors, only one of which is the presence of dream images.
One of the major challenges to the existing method is that some participants in laboratory experiments report not having dreamt despite the fact that their eyes were moving, and vice versa. In people who are blind from birth, no eye movements are observed, while in an experiment conducted on cats whose vision had degraded with age, eye movement was still preserved.
Scientists are not yet sure if you can move your eyes without signs of arousal or wakefulness, as some studies in recent years have shown that eye movements during REM sleep occur without changing muscle tone, under the influence of micro-arousal, and this may indicate a transitional phase of sleep. Thus, there is more and more evidence to suggest that data regarding this method of recording lucid dreams needs to be updated for future research.
The study was published in April 2020 in the scientific magazine Frontiers in Neuroscience.
