Can people learn to remain conscious inside their dreams — and could doing so reveal something about how the human brain works while we sleep?
A collaboration between neuroscientists and Buddhist scholars in Bhutan is exploring that question by studying Dream Yoga, a centuries-old Tibetan contemplative practice in which practitioners cultivate awareness during sleep and dreams.
The research brings together traditional Buddhist knowledge, modern brain-monitoring technology and detailed interviews with practitioners in an attempt to examine what happens in the brain when a sleeping person becomes aware that they are dreaming.
Dream Yoga has long been practised as a spiritual discipline, using dreams and sleep as part of a broader path towards self-understanding and awakening. For scientists, however, experienced practitioners also offer an unusual opportunity: the ability to study conscious experiences occurring while the body remains asleep.
During sleep, much of the body’s voluntary muscular activity is temporarily suppressed. Eye movements and breathing, however, remain possible. Researchers are using those two channels to communicate with participants without waking them.
Participants sleep while connected to electroencephalography, or EEG, equipment, which records electrical activity in the brain. When practitioners become aware that they are dreaming — a phenomenon commonly known as lucid dreaming — they can perform predetermined patterns of eye movements to signal researchers.
They can also use breathing patterns, including repeated sniffing, to indicate when they are performing specific Dream Yoga practices. This gives researchers a time marker that can be matched against the EEG recording.
“If they only told us when they woke up, we wouldn’t know exactly when during the night it happened, but this allows us to look at the brain activity at exactly that time, and we hope to understand the practice better,” said Ken Paller, a US cognitive neuroscientist and lead researcher on the project.
Paller said the team is examining a range of practices performed by Buddhist monks to understand both their potential benefits and how sleep-based contemplative techniques differ from meditation and other practices performed while awake.
Connecting brain signals with lived experience
Brain recordings tell only part of the story. Researchers are also using a technique known as micro-phenomenology to reconstruct what participants experienced during particular moments of their dreams.
The interview method involves carefully questioning participants about the details of an experience, including aspects they may not initially have noticed or remembered.
“We try to help people recall and describe their past experiences with precision,” said Ema Demsar, a postdoctoral researcher from Australia.
Rather than simply asking someone what they dreamed about, researchers might examine how a particular image emerged or where the participant’s attention was directed at the time.
“If you have an experience of, I don’t know, seeing a face, we might ask you, how did that face first appear? How was your attention when you were seeing that face?” Demsar explained.
The technique allows researchers to compare subjective accounts from practitioners with measurements collected from their brains at approximately the same point during sleep.
“So, through the microphenomenology interview, we link that first-person experience with the third-person data,” said researcher Khenpo Namchak Dorje. That comparison, he said, could help scientists better understand what is taking place during Dream Yoga.
The project therefore approaches dreaming from two directions: the measurable electrical activity of the sleeping brain and the practitioner’s own detailed account of what was experienced.
Beyond the study of dreams
Researchers believe the work could eventually contribute to a wider understanding of sleep, consciousness and some mental-health conditions.
One area already attracting scientific interest is the use of lucid dreaming for people who experience persistent nightmares.
“Lucid dreaming is now used for treatment of nightmare disorder,” said Gabriela Torres-Plata, a US neuroscientist and research associate involved in the project.
She said researchers are conducting studies in which people with nightmares are taught lucid dreaming techniques alongside elements of Dream Yoga. Scientists are also investigating whether similar approaches could eventually have applications for anxiety, depression and other psychiatric conditions.
The research comes amid a broader scientific effort to understand what the brain does while people sleep.
Scientists know that sleep plays an important role in processing memories and experiences, although many of the underlying mechanisms remain under investigation.
“There are different signals of the brain that we can register, and they allow us to see different states of the brain that we’re still trying to understand,” Paller said.
Events experienced during waking life can reappear or be processed during sleep, sometimes without entering conscious dreams at all, he added. Understanding those processes could eventually improve scientists’ ability to address sleep disorders and investigate how healthy sleep benefits the brain.
Ancient practice meets modern neuroscience
The Dream Yoga study has been carried out over the past two months with 20 participants, including Buddhist scholars and practitioners from Bhutan and other countries.
While the research is still exploratory, the collaboration provides scientists with access to practitioners trained in maintaining forms of awareness during sleep — something that can be difficult to reproduce reliably in conventional sleep laboratories.
For Buddhist practitioners, meanwhile, the project provides a scientific framework through which practices preserved for generations can be documented and examined.
Researchers hope the collaboration will ultimately deepen scientific understanding of Dream Yoga while opening further avenues for cooperation between contemplative traditions and neuroscience.
For Bhutan, the project also represents an unusual meeting of two systems of inquiry: traditional Buddhist knowledge of the mind and the instruments of modern sleep science.
And at the centre of both lies a deceptively simple question — how much of the sleeping mind can a person learn to observe, and perhaps even control?
