“Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep”, in the journal Current Biology…

“… the researchers attempted to communicate with people while they were still dreaming … placed electrodes on the participants’ heads … Four independent lab groups in the U.S., Germany, France and the Netherlands conducted four separate experiments. The researchers used several techniques across the experiments to communicate with dreamers during REM sleep … If dreamers received and understood the question or message during a lucid dream, they then responded with a set of distinctive eye or facial movements that were interpreted by the electrodes.”

Apparently morse-code is used as one communication method. But it’s not just some postgrads trying to grab headlines with some fudgy research, and Cell is not a predatory ‘you pay, we publish’ journal. A journalist at Live Science queried “Robert Stickgold, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School” about the new paper and he is said to have called the study “groundbreaking … Two-way, real-time communication between researchers and lucid dreamers immersed in REM sleep offers a new and exciting window into the study of dreams and dreaming”. Fair enough, it seems legit then. And thus makes for an interesting comparison with what Lovecraft was suggesting just over a century ago…

from Lovecraft’s “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” (1919)… “[long interested in investigating dream-life and] mental communication by means of suitable apparatus, I had in my college days prepared a set of transmitting and receiving instruments somewhat similar to the cumbrous devices employed in wireless telegraphy at that crude, pre-radio period. […] in my intense desire to probe into the dream life of Joe Slater, I sought these instruments again; and spent several days in repairing them for action. When they were complete once more I missed no opportunity for their trial. At each outburst of Slater’s violence, I would fit the transmitter to his forehead and the receiver to my own; constantly making delicate adjustments for various hypothetical wave-lengths of intellectual energy. I had but little notion of how the thought-impressions would, if successfully conveyed, arouse an intelligent response in my brain; but I felt certain that I could detect and interpret them. [The “head-bands” device is fitted to the sleeping Jo Slater]. At this juncture my brain became aware of a steady external influence operating upon it. I closed my eyes to concentrate my thoughts more profoundly, and was rewarded by the positive knowledge that my long-sought mental message had come at last. Each transmitted idea formed rapidly in my mind, and though no actual language was employed, my habitual association of conception and expression was so great that I seemed to be receiving the message in ordinary English.”