Originally published at: New study: People who are dreaming can have rational conversations with those who are awake | Boing Boing
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I had a girlfriend who talked in her sleep and it was possible to engage her in conversation.
But it was a tricky thing. Responses would have to be relevant to whatever she had said yet her thread was apt to wander. And if I replied with something incongruous the spell would break and she would wake up.
And generally after four or five exchanges she would either wake up or go quietly back to sleep.
I wouldn’t really call it rational conversation though.
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New study: People who are dreaming can have rational conversations with those who are awake
I perfected this when working the graveyard shift at a gasoline station [circa 1972], it has served me well through out my many careers. And likely the exact reason I wasn’t fired many more times then I was…
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This sounds like backdoor Buddhism.
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Good name for a band.
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Well that’s the whole point of lucid dreams – your mind is not asleep. You’re dreaming but the mind is awake while the body remains asleep.
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It’s like tripping on acid, but for free.
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My sister does this. If you try to wake her up and she doesn’t wanna, she’ll sit up like Dracula slowly rising from his coffin, and she boots up some kind of subroutine that will have a basic conversation with you, but she looks dead and she’ll have no memory of it at all. It’s very disturbing.
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My wife does something similar. She won’t rise like Dracula, but we can have a conversation, with complete and real answers, that she will not remember at all when she wakes up.
I can have conversations, but they’re complete dream nonsense: “Where did you put that thing?” “It’s on the roof, with the peanut butter.” I also used to sleepwalk when I was a kid and teenager, but have since grown out of it.
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Back when phones involved lifting a receiver rather than swiping a screen, I would occasionally wake up mid-conversation, and have to try to figure out what was going on.
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This accurately describes every dream I’ve ever had, although I would never have said I was lucid dreamer because I have no control over the situation at all (unless I want to wake up).
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Hmmmm… I wonder if this is at all related to an anecdote from my youth: one night my mother was heading to bed when she went past my room and noticed I had the window fan running despite it being a breezy night, so she popped her head in and told me to turn it off hoping I was awake. I promptly said “Yes, mom” or somesuch, sat up, turned it off, and lay right back down. Or at least this is what she told me the next morning when I asked how my fan turned itself off.
Beyond that, when someone walks into my room to see if I’m awake, I already am. One extreme example is that one snowy, winter night my sister got stuck in the driveway in the wee hours when she tried to leave for her shift, and came to me to help push the car out… But far from having to wake me up, it felt like I’d been awake before she entered the room when I asked her what she needed in response to her calling my name.
Personally, I’ve always though it’s because our minds acted like bodycams… Listening and storing the last few seconds in volatile memory so it’s available right when we awake. I mean, if someone can wake you up by calling your name… Or apparently have a chat with you while you’re dreaming…
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Interesting study, but calling these “successful conversations” is a bit of a stretch, in my opinion. Subjects provided simple answers (“no”, “4”, etc.) via rudimentary communication methods (eye movements or facial muscle contractions).
Next, they should try Randall Munroe’s TCMP (Trans-Conciousness Messaging Protocol).
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Doubt it. Where are you even go to find enough persons that can have a rational conversation awake? There can’t be more than two dozen of us!
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My beloved wife does this as well. I even have a catalogue of some of the things she says in her sleep. Here goes:
“I spent the day with a chimpanzee – You should try it!”
Can you look under the bed? I think my Epilim is there." ( On two separate occasions! Epilim was her anticonvulsant at the time. She has Epilepsy.)
“The colours in this recipe are indistinguishable!”
“Everything is Beans on Toast!”
“That’s a perfectly good question – not sure of the answer.”
“Oh, well done, lovey, well done!”
“Let’s all go back to sleep.”
“The bit that’s missing is the pump.”
“It’ll take us a couple of weeks to get settled back in.”
“Ah, it’s only three o’clock.”
“Aren’t you clever!”
“I could just as easily wipe my bum!”
“I would like some advice, please. WELL?”
— there’s more, but that’s enough, I’m sure you’ll agree. 
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I thought this was Flossy’s whole thing.
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so one day in high school I was in World History class listening to the lecture when the teacher posed a question. I thought to myself “oh, I know this one” and right then my teacher called on me. she was in front of the blackboard, and she was staring right at me. I was staring right back at her. I kept trying to answer but I was choked up for some reason. I was trying to communicate this with my eyes while she kept repeating my name more-and-more irritably. she was from Mississippi and had a really thick accent: “Ayed. Ayed! AYED!!” (I told her my name was Ed on the first day of class and she never questioned it, lol.)
I finally forced my throat to work and then my eyes opened except everything was black.
“AYED! AYED!!”
I realized I was no longer upright facing the blackboard, I was instantly face down in the blackness.
so I raised my head back upright. light streamed in from between my folded arms. in one motion, I went from looking at my teacher in front of the blackboard, to instant blackness and literal 90° disorientation, to slowly raising my head to see the real image of my teacher standing in front of the blackboard.
I was so bewildered, I wasn’t even embarrassed. I could have rescued it by answering the question but I was unable to process what was happening. Easily the weirdest thing to happen to me before I started doing drugs. At least equal to my weirdest acid trips.
but nothing like that has ever happend before or since. I sleep very soundly and while I usually dream, I usually forget them the instant I awake.
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I do this a lot, sometimes having a real conversation and sometimes answering with mostly grammatically correct nonsense. It also happens when I’m really tired but not really asleep yet, which (combined with other weirdness with me and sleep) has led to some strangeness at times. Also, I will not have any memory of the conversation even a few seconds later, let alone when I wake up.
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Well sometimes I’m amazed that people who are awake can have rational conversations with people who are awake
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My brother sort of does this (or used to). One night when I was in my early teens my parents were out, and I realised it was after midnight (which is unusually late for them), so I went into my brother’s room to ask him if he knew if/when they were coming back.
He was asleep, but when I called his name he sat up, opened his eyes and looked at me. I asked him if he knew when our folks were getting back, and he stared at me and replied “We don’t have time! We have to run, they’re nearly here!”.
I just let him go back to sleep (well, more asleep), and of course he had no memory in the morning.
I’m not sure if he lucid dreamed, but he used to be a very active sleeper. When we had to share beds as kids, I’d usually wake up in the morning crammed up to one side of the bed, with him diagonally across it.
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