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“You can argue that REM sleep is a kind of neglected resource,” says Benjamin Byrd, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies human cognition. “What if we could use this state where people can actually control their thoughts and actions and decide what they want to do? The state can potentially be used for fun and creative tasks – solving and studying how memory works, and all kinds of different [neuroscience]… ”

Byrd believes that one of the most interesting applications of lucid dreaming can be art. “One of the tricks I’ve met with visual artists is to find an ‘art gallery’ in their lucid dream and look at a painting hanging in the gallery,” he says. “Then they wake up and draw what they saw. The same can be done in the same way for listening to notes. It’s like somebody else is creating it, but it’s your own mind. ”

A small but growing number of scientists, led by Byrd and other sleep labs around the world, are hoping to learn more about how lucid dreaming works, how it is triggered, and whether the average person can be taught to do it regularly. By studying people who can remember what happened to them in their dreams, these researchers can correlate which cognitive processes are taking place in the mind, while the brain and physiological activity are measured and observed. For example, how does the brain perceive specific objects or physical tasks performed exclusively in the mind? How does he react to visuals that don’t really exist? How does he imitate parts of consciousness without actually being fully conscious?

Some researchers, such as Martin Dresler, a cognitive neuroscientist at Radbaud University in the Netherlands, suggest that lucid dreaming can even be used to combat clinical disorders such as recurring nightmares or PTSD. “I think it’s pretty intuitive and believable that if you realize it’s not real during the nightmare, it obviously takes the pain away from the nightmare,” he says. You may be able to simply train yourself to wake up and stop sleeping, or overcome very intense feelings of fear and fear by telling yourself that this is a dream.

In one memorable dream, I played cards with my grandmother, who died many years ago. This experience helped me understand my emotions towards her in a way that I could never have handled as an angry 13-year-old.