Dr. Başak Türker

Tell them to sleep.

And if they are having a dream that they're aware of, a lucid dream, they can send us a signal.

And with this idea, which is, for me, it's incredible, they actually managed to show that sleeping people were actually sending the eye signals to tell, I'm having a lucid dream.

So this illness comes with a superpower.

You also become a great lucid dreamer.

So he was having a lot of lucid dreams and he would tell us about his adventures in the night.

So we thought, OK, that's great.

So we can maybe do a little experiment on you.

So they answer and they mumble.

They're like, and sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn't.

We call them micro arousals.

So your brain kind of wakes up for a second.

But I think we were still a bit naive about it.

We're like, yeah, let's try, but we didn't really.

We were like, it might work, but it might not work.

And then we ask them, for example, some questions.

Is he really sleeping?

And we were checking the brain activity.

He is.

But he's responding, right?

She's like, yeah, yeah, he's responding.

She asks more questions.

Do you watch football?

Do you speak Spanish?

We were like, do you see what I'm seeing?

And she was like, yes.

So it was crazy because we were communicating with someone who was dreaming.

And we were alone in this room and super excited.

And, you know, like half yelling with excitement and half shocked.

I think it was one of the scientifically the best moments of my life, I would say, when I saw that.

It's...

No, I felt like we discovered a new element, you know?

It felt so... I think I smiled for a week, non-stop.

I was so happy.

It's crazy, but they were also able to do the task.

So they were indeed asleep according to their brain activity, but they were able to respond.

There are chances.

It's not all the time, but it looks like there are some transient windows of opening, let's say, in which participants respond and then they stop responding.

Yes.

So if you are lucid dreaming, you tend to respond way more.

When you're lucid, in our study, what we see is that your brain activity is more complex, more rich and more rapid compared to when they were not lucid.

Exactly.

It's like rich, but not so rich.

In a dream, you might have your mom that transforms to a cat and you wouldn't be shocked.

You'd be like, oh yeah, my mom's a cat now, it's okay.

It's because probably your frontal cortex is a bit deactivated so you don't get shocked by this.

which allows you to detect anomalies in your dream and be like, oh, this is a dream because this doesn't make sense.

This wouldn't happen in everyday life.

state for the brain to maintain you know it almost like wants to tend towards either just waking up or falling into non-lucidity so maybe it's a way your brain to get back to this you know it's natural state but yeah i don't know that's that's very insane that your dream characters would tell you this is life exactly it's completely insane okay our next question

It feels so real.

You're like, how is this possible?

It feels so real.