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The Latest in Dream Technologies: The Science Behind Inception
Dream research takes a step toward Christopher Nolan's Inception tech.
Real-world scientists have succeeded in intentionally changing the contents of a person’s dreams, even reducing the frequency of nightmares, but the process isn’t quite as cinematic as Christopher Nolan’s 2010 science fiction thriller, Inception (now streaming on Peacock).
In the movie, corporate spies Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) use advanced technologies to invade the dreamscapes of their targets. Once inside, they navigate the dream world to find where a person hides their deepest secrets and then they sell that information for money. At least, that’s usually how it goes. This particular job involves a much more complicated endeavor, rather than taking an idea, they need to leave one behind.
Planting an idea like dissolving your father’s company might be useful in the fictional world of high-tech corporate espionage, but planting concepts like peace and security might actually help people suffering from nightmare disorders.
Targeted memory reactivation is Inception’s real-world counterpart
In Inception, Cobb and the team have to get in and out without their target figuring out what’s going on. In the real world, participants know their dreams are being changed. In fact, they’re banking on it. Researchers from the University of Geneva studied a group of 36 individuals, each of which had chronic and terrifying nightmares.
Nightmare disorders are typically treated through image rehearsal therapy (IRT), which involves patients imagining more pleasant dream scenarios. While awake, patients recall a frequent nightmare scenario, change the narrative to include a positive ending, and rehearse that new narrative during the day. If, for instance, your dream involves being chased down a dark corridor, you might imagine a door appearing in the wall and a pleasant escape on the other side. By reinforcing that narrative during the day, you’re more likely to play out that new narrative during sleep. Over time, IRT has been shown to reduce the frequency of nightmares.
In addition to conventional IRT, the study published in Current Biology introduced targeted memory reactivation (TMR) facilitated by a musical tone. Each participant imagined and rehearsed their own reframing of a common nightmare and tracked the frequency of nightmares throughout the study period. For the test group, a musical tone was played during their rehearsal period with the hope that replaying it during sleep might trigger the rehearsed narrative.
Participants wore a headband which tracked the sleep stages during the night and initiated the tone once the sleeper had entered REM. While both groups (test and control) experienced an overall reduction in nightmares, the effect was significantly larger in the TMR test group.
Treating nightmare disorders by changing people’s dreams
The study demonstrates that external stimuli from the waking world can influence the content of dreams when that stimulus is associated with the desired scenario. It should be noted, however, that a lot more research is needed before we’ll know precisely what’s going on. Researchers suggest that TMR may help with the overall consolidation of memories and might not be targeted to a specific memory or idea.
It’s within the realm of our current scientific understanding to implant concepts or feelings into the minds of sleepers, at least with their express participation. Fortunately, this blurring of the waking and sleeping worlds isn’t being used for nefarious purposes. Instead, it could be used to help people stuck in a nightmare.
Nightmares show up in people across cultures and demographics. They are one of the truly universal experiences, with most people experiencing the occasional bad dream. They are most frequent in young children and usually decrease significantly as people get older. Still, about 5% of the population reports a nightmare at least once per week with some folks having bad dreams more often than not. Nightmares can present in the absence of any other mental illness, but may also be a symptom of PTSD or other psychopathologies. In either case, combining IRT with an external trigger stimulus might be an effective new treatment for keeping the nightmares at bay.
Watch Christopher Nolan’s Inception, streaming now on Peacock.
