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A little electrical current applied to the brain helped volunteers in research study take control of their dreams.

(iStock | ThinkStock)

Dreams of being naked in homeroom, having to take a test you didn't study for, being chased by a psychopath and similar recurring nightmares could be brought under control by a little electrical current applied to the brain, according to research published Sunday.

The current induces "lucid dreaming," a state in which the sleeper knows he's dreaming and can gain control of the dream's plot, Reuters reported.

The discoverers, a research team led by Ursula Voss of J.W. Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany, hope the technique can be used to treat people with mental illnesses such as post-traumatic stress disorder and some types of schizophrenia, NBC News said.

The research built on previous lab work in which volunteers who showed rapid eye movement while sleeping experienced lucid dreams. Electroencephalograms showed those dreams were accompanied by brain waves called gamma waves, Reuters said. Those waves are associated with executive thinking and self-awareness and almost never happen in REM sleep, the news service said.

That led Voss' group to ask what would happen if they induced an electrical current in a dreaming subject's brain of the same frequency as a gamma wave.

They tested the concept on 27 volunteers, introducing weak current to the frontal and temporal portions of their brains through electrodes on their scalps when the subjects showed signs of being in REM sleep. The subjects subsequently reported having had lucid dreams, "waking up" within the dream to take control of the situation, say by putting on clothes or flying from danger, The Telegraph said.

One volunteer reported dreaming about lemon cake, NBC cited as an example.

"It looked translucent, but then again, it didn't. It was a bit like in an animated movie, like the 'Simpsons,' " the dreamer said. "Then I realized 'Oops, you are dreaming.' I mean, while I was dreaming! So strange!"

Writing in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the Voss group speculated that lucid dreams could be induced in people who suffer recurring nightmares. The dreamer then could be coached on how to take control of the dream and make it less threatening, The Telegraph said.