“I started to see these crazy images, like a computer screensaver with those ribbony coloured lines” August Jennewein/Courtesy UMSL

Lucid dreams are a unique state of mind when you are asleep and dreaming, but also alert and able to control your actions (see “Heal yourself from inside your dreams”). When Remington Mallett at the University of Missouri-St Louis learned that people who had lost the use of their limbs can control robotic arms with their thoughts, he wondered if people having lucid dreams could similarly control a computer. A lucid dreamer himself, he decided to give it a go.

What made you want to see if you could control things with your thoughts from within a dream?

I had seen quite a lot of research about brain-computer-interfaces (BCI), devices that people wear on their heads that pick up electrical signals from the brain and let you operate a computer or even a robotic limb using your thoughts. A team at Brown University helped a woman who had been paralysed for years use a BCI to control a robotic arm and use it to drink coffee. Around that time I also saw research suggesting brain activity looks the same for actions during waking and in a lucid dream. So I made the link; if a BCI works by detecting movement in areas that control motor skills when you’re awake, we should be able to do it in a lucid dream too.

You decided to try this yourself first. How did you go about it?

I wanted to train myself to use a BCI, and then try to move a block on a computer screen using only my thoughts. When I first started learning how to use it, my attention was all over the place. Usually, you’re supposed to look at the computer screen to train, but because I wanted to use it from within a lucid dream, I trained with my eyes closed. I imagined pushing this block forward with my hands. It took a few days of training to get to 70 per cent accuracy.


Were you nervous about whether it would work once you were asleep?

No: as long as I could attempt the task before waking, I knew it should work. I hoped that it did, so that I and others could then build on the research. In principle, lucid dreams could be used for anything – from controlling prostheses to sports training. It was a proof of concept.

Read more: How you can control what happens in your dreams

What happened in your lucid dream?

I started to see these crazy images, like a computer screensaver with those ribbony coloured lines. That’s when I knew I was probably dreaming and then I found myself in the room where I was doing the experiment. Usually when I become lucid, in the dream I am in the actual room or bed where I am sleeping. I started thinking, “I’m lucid, this is awesome.”

You can control your eye movements when you’re in a lucid dream. Once I realised I was lucid I thought, “I’ve got to give the eye signal and then I have to push the block.’ So I made a quick series of left-right eye movements, which were recorded by the headset.

Were you able to move the block?

In the dream I saw a cave painting on the wall, and it started peeling off. At the same time this witchy spirit in the decal starts coming towards me, at my chest. It went right into my dream body, and usually that would wake me up or freak me out but I didn’t care, I was too focused on doing the task, on visualising pushing the block forward.

It felt like having the task helped to stabilise the dream, I was so intent. I had the headset on, I got into a lucid dream, so I felt like this has got to happen now. Once I started successfully doing the task I got excited. I was enthusiastic to wake up and report everything, and to check the recordings from the computer program to show that I’d moved the box, and had done this after giving the signal that I was lucid.

How did you feel when you woke up?

When I woke up I wrote down everything that happened and I did an audio version too. Usually I would do one or the other but in this case I wanted to document the whole thing. You can tell in my journal I was so enthusiastic. It worked.

What’s next?

I want to know the difference in brain activity between waking actions, dreamed actions and imagined actions. It would be awesome to have someone in an MRI scanner and have them do a motor task, then have them imagine doing it, and finally have them do the task from within a lucid dream.

Read more: Heal yourself from inside your dreams