--- title: The New Science of Dreaming description: Researchers have figured out how to induce lucid dreaming—and are using it to help answer to ancient questions about our minds. canonical: https://time.com/article/2026/08/18/new-science-of-dreaming/ author: Veronique Greenwood article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2026-08-18T12:00:04.377Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-18T12:00:04.649Z article:section: Health og:title: The New Science of Dreaming og:description: Researchers have figured out how to induce lucid dreaming—and are using it to help answer to ancient questions about our minds. og:url: https://time.com/article/2026/08/18/new-science-of-dreaming/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt02f494e6b8c047ef/6a833d9fa4135acc4f9121d7/260907WDREAMS_006.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1200 og:image:alt: 260907WDREAMS_006.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The New Science of Dreaming twitter:description: Researchers have figured out how to induce lucid dreaming—and are using it to help answer to ancient questions about our minds. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt02f494e6b8c047ef/6a833d9fa4135acc4f9121d7/260907WDREAMS_006.jpg?branch=production ---  # The New Science of Dreaming  --- Photographs by [Will Matsuda](/author/will-matsuda/)for TIME Story by [Veronique Greenwood](https://time.com/author/veronique-greenwood/) Aug 18, 2026 12:00 PM UTC I’m reclining in a large blue chair in a small dark room: earbuds in, tinted glasses on, eyelids closed. Clasping my head is a swimmer’s cap of electrodes fastened under my chin. My fingers are wrapped in sensors. I hear a voice through a monitor: “Now we’re going to flash some lights.” When I see flashes, I am to move my cheek twice in the direction they came from. I get similar instructions about sounds I hear and vibrations I feel in my fingers. Karen Konkoly, a postdoctoral researcher at University of Cambridge in the U.K., and Marco Wolf, a German graduate student working with her, are getting ready to watch me while I dream. No one really knows [why people dream](https://time.com/article/2026/03/31/can-dreaming-help-you-sleep-more-deeply/). There have been psychoanalytical theories, of course. Sigmund Freud [wrote](https://archive.org/details/interpretationof1913freu) that dreams were a kind of acting-out of repressed impulses. And since long before Freud, dreams have been regarded as prophetic. They can feel important, [like they ought to mean something](https://time.com/archive/6933233/why-dreams-mean-less-than-we-think/). However, when scientists imagine what evolutionary purpose [dreams](https://time.com/6298730/climate-change-dreams/) might have—how they might be helping us survive this crazy whirlwind called life—definitive answers have been hard to come by. Whatever insight we might get from thinking about our own dreams is unlikely to be the whole story. Studies suggest [we dream multiple times per night](https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/48/Supplement%5F1/A38/8135786), and we forget almost all of them, so whatever purpose dreams might serve probably doesn’t depend only on our remembering them. Does dreaming help us make memories? [Learn from our experiences](https://time.com/7381398/can-dreams-help-you-solve-problems/)? Or is it just keeping us entertained while important business is attended to by the brain? In recent decades, scientists have approached this problem from a number of angles, and today, I’m taking part in one such stab at an answer. Konkoly is a rising star in the world of dream research, the co-inventor of a way to help people dream lucidly. Lucid dreaming, first named in a [scientific paper](https://dreamscience.ca/en/documents/New%20content/lucid%20dreaming%20pdfs/vanEeden%5FPSPR%5F26%5F1-12%5F1913.pdf) back in 1913, occurs when dreamers realize they are dreaming. In some cases, they can deliberately influence the events of the dream. Lucid dreaming is a skill that can be taught, and Konkoly is quite good at it; she guesses she has dreamed lucidly about 185 times in her life. In her first lucid dream, she decided to fly, and did: “I got a few feet off the ground, breaststroking through the air,” she recalls. More than half the population [reports](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810016301283) having lucid dreamed at some point in their life—23% say they do so regularly—and scientists believe that lucid dreamers could provide a way to test hypotheses about what dreams do, since they may be able to alter dreams on demand.  Will Matsuda for TIME In a landmark [study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33607035/) in 2021, Konkoly and colleagues found that lucid dreamers can sometimes even communicate with scientists in real time, responding to spoken questions by signaling with their eyes under closed lids, for instance. In search of what makes that possible, and in hopes of increasing the frequency of such communication, in her current experiment she is asking me and, in other sessions, about 50 others to perform the task as we fall asleep of moving our cheeks to signal from which direction a stimulus comes. The hope is that I’ll somehow be able to do this even when I’m unconscious. As I listen to the beeps and start to grow drowsy, I wonder: When I’m dreaming, will I be able to answer? --- Dreams have not always been a fashionable target of study. When Robert Stickgold, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, began to study sleep and dreams in the 1990s, scientists who studied dreams were few and far between. Those who did tended to collect dream reports from people when they woke up and catalog them; they were usually focused on emphatically [rejecting](https://www.thebeliever.net/hobsons-choice/) Freud’s ideas and suspected that dreams were meaningless. When we sleep, we lose consciousness, which puts us in a vulnerable psychological state, Freud believed. All sorts of weird and unsavory repressed desires could emerge, and the function of dreams is to disguise these from ourselves, he wrote. Freud thought that “dreams are an attempt to take these suppressed wishes and convert them into something that would be palatable, so instead of dreaming about wanting to sleep with your mother, or actually sleeping with your mother, you dream about eating a watermelon or something,” Stickgold tells me. “Their function was to keep you from being woken up by these horrible subconscious desires you had.” When in the early 1990s he went to work with J. Allan Hobson, a [pioneer](https://www.harvardmagazine.com/sites/default/files/html/1998/05/dream2.html) of the modern study of dreams who was famously anti-\-Freudian, it was often assumed “that dreams had no function at all,” says Stickgold. They were just noise in the neurons. Stickgold didn’t believe that dreams hid suppressed desires. But he also wasn’t so sure they were pointless. It seemed clear to him that dreams drew on rehashed moments from the recent past, and he began to think about what that meant. Focusing first on sleep, he [found](https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0896627302007468) that people who learned a new task and then slept on it [were better at it after waking](https://www.sportsmed.theclinics.com/article/S0278-5919%2804%2900121-8/abstract) than people who tried it again without first going to sleep. Looking more specifically at dreams, in 2000 he dropped a [bombshell](https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.290.5490.350) in the world of dream research: when scientists had healthy people play Tetris before falling asleep, they reported dreaming about the game—but the same thing happened in a group of people with brain damage who’d played the game, despite their having no memory of playing it. This suggested that dreams were drawing on the events of the day—even for people who could not consciously recall them—and working with them somehow. In later [experiments](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jsr.12749), he and Erin Wamsley, now a cognitive neuroscientist at Furman University, discovered that dreaming of a memorization task was correlated with doing it better in the morning. Today Stickgold is widely perceived as [one of the giants of modern dream science](https://academic.oup.com/sleepadvances/article/7/2/zpag041/8650449), having inspired and trained a generation of researchers. After decades of studying dreams, what does he think they’re for? He has some thoughts. He has developed what he calls the [NEXTUP theory of dreaming](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abf7609), short for Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities. “The model basically says that while we’re sleeping, the brain looks for often very weak associations to waking concerns, and then builds a story around it in a dream to see if it’s feasible as an explanation of what’s going on in our lives,” Stickgold says. This would account for the way that everyday concerns (like missing the bus) and unlikely occurrences (being chased by evildoers) can mesh in dreams, forming a mix of strange situations. But it isn’t clear how to prove or disprove the idea, Stickgold says.   Will Matsuda for TIME So far, it has been very difficult to prove that a dream is actually causing any effect at all, whether that’s learning a new physical skill or learning to navigate a new environment; it’s merely been shown that these are associated. That’s why lucid dreaming is such an exciting target. If scientists can interfere with a dream while it is happening, they might be able to more directly link waking actions to dreams. This year, Konkoly and Ken Paller, a cognitive neuroscientist and a professor at Northwestern University, [made inroads](https://time.com/7381398/can-dreams-help-you-solve-problems/) with a new study in which they had people play logic puzzles set to music during the day, then told them they might play some of the same songs later on while they slept, which was their cue to keep working on those puzzles in the dream. People who managed to do that were more likely to solve those puzzles the following morning than puzzles that weren’t cued by a song. By manipulating dreams in real time, Konkoly got a little closer to showing that they might have some power over the waking world. --- What do dream researchers dream about? The same things as most people: pieces of the past few days, the homes they grew up in, bizarre catastrophes they cannot prevent. But Wolf and Konkoly, my experimenters, who both track their own dreams closely, are paying more attention than most of us. When Wolf was 6, his father and sister wanted to teach him inline skating, and after too many failed attempts, he quit. Years later, as a teenager, he accepted a friend’s invitation to skate despite not knowing how, and the night before they were to meet he found himself dreaming lucidly about skating. Since lucid dreams mean you might have control over what happens, he decided to practice. “The next day when I tried again, after this long time, I suddenly was able to do it, and within a few weeks I had actually quite surpassed everyone I knew,” he says. “I just wondered, What else is possible with the brain?” It wasn’t a fluke. Since that first lucid dream, Wolf has used them when faced with tricky problems, knowing that there’s a good chance he might be able to keep working on them in a dream. Several times, the nights before Latin tests in school, he recalls speaking with the philosopher Seneca in lucid dreams to help him practice. “I cannot say that something caused this,” he cautions. But “I had this subjective feeling that on the next day, it was way more intuitive and way more easy to translate the Latin exam. And funnily, always when this happened, my grade was just amazing.” Lucid dreams might be some of the best tools scientists have to really get to the bottom of what everyday dreams do. Ever since Konkoly first learned, in college, that people studied them professionally, she knew what she wanted to do. “‘I want that to be my job,’” she recalls thinking. “So then, that is what I doggedly pursued.” After college in 2017, she moved to Wales and worked with dream researcher Michelle Carr at Swansea University. Many of the techniques that had been used in previous studies to trigger lucid dreaming involved weeks of training for the participants ahead of time. But Carr wanted to compress it all into the tedious period of time when researchers were wiring people up with EEG electrodes, which researchers use to monitor brain waves, confirm someone is sleeping, and tell what stage of sleep they are in. Carr and Konkoly came up with a [shortened protocol](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-24631-001) that trained people how to become lucid and signal that they have done so by moving their closed eyes back and forth.   Will Matsuda for TIME Then they started a 10-day experiment in which they recruited 41 people to take naps in the lab. Carr and Konkoly would wire everyone up with EEG, perform their lucid-dreaming protocol, and let people drift off. And people dreamed, often lucidly. “‘I can’t believe it’s working,’” Konkoly and Carr would say to each other. “They were kind of weird lucid dreams that were really short,” Konkoly recalls. But the effect was real. In the end, they [found](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-24631-001) that about half of people who went through their protocol were able to lucid dream. With her newfound ability to make large numbers of people “go lucid,” as practitioners call it, Konkoly joined Paller’s lab at Northwestern to finally experiment with seeing whether people in lucid dreams could communicate while asleep. In 2021, they and their colleagues [reported](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982221000592) that they had sent messages to dreamers in real time, asking them to answer math problems and other questions, and in some cases those people had responded by moving their eyes under their lids or by twitching facial muscles using a pre-arranged code. If it’s possible to get people to consistently reply to questions about their dreams as they are happening, and even change what’s happening in the dream in real time, then it may be possible to perform experiments that directly address what dreams are doing for us. It could give us “a whole new dimension for studying dreaming,” Paller says. Stickgold agrees. “We have to try to find ways to experimentally manipulate dream content,” he says. “If we get good enough at that, and the younger people are smarter than us, maybe that’ll provide a mechanism to provide experimental testing of some of these models.” Paller—who, when we spoke recently, was about to leave for Bhutan—is now making [recordings of brain waves from Buddhists](https://www.cogneurosociety.org/creating-a-blueprint-for-sleep-engineering/) who perform lucid dreaming as part of their practice. “We’re going to set up in a hotel and have them come in in the capital of Bhutan from different regions in the country,” he said. “And if things go smoothly, we’re hopeful that we’ll get some interesting results.” --- In the dark in the lab, I start to drift off. It’s late afternoon, and I skipped coffee this morning so I could be sure of napping for Konkoly and Wolf. In this study, the researchers are looking to understand why dreamers sometimes perceive stimuli from outside the dream, like the flashes of light and vibrations, and sometimes don’t, with the goal of finding out the best ways to communicate with dreamers. Konkoly told me of many nights she spent in the sleep lab at Northwestern, watching dreamers: “Every now and then—they’re there. They’re answering. And then they’re gone again. How does that happen?” This is no ordinary nap. As I drift off, vibrations strum my fingertips, and low tones play in the earbuds. Between these stimuli, strange thoughts move through my semi-conscious mind, the kind of free association that feels normal in sleep and bizarre in life. Names, words, rabbits, phone booths, train announcements—but just when I start to go under, the lights, tones, and vibrations kick in and wake me back up. I try to keep responding; after a long, dark interval, I am so tired that I stop, and then I am dreaming. I am with my son, digging in the back garden of a brick row house. We are burying something in the lawn. I respond to a few stimuli, then I have the impression that someone in a position of authority—a man with a mustache?—is reprimanding me for failing to keep something level. Then I am awake. The electrodes taped to my face are suddenly palpable.  Will Matsuda for TIME Konkoly’s voice crackles over the monitor. “Can you tell me everything you remember about your dreams and experiences?” I recount as much as I can, fuzzy from the sleep, and then stumble off to my hotel for the night—where, in the morning, I wake up with the sense of having dreamed many times over. All I can remember is the kind of dream where I’m scheduling plane flights, penciling on calendars, memorizing dates. Back at the lab, we look at the rainbow of electrode readings from last night, where my brain waves collapse into the slow waves of deep sleep. From a first look, it appears that the moments when I responded to the stimuli were moments when I awakened briefly, rather than when I was fully asleep. But the study is only at its beginning. I am the 11th sleeper in this experiment, with 40 left to go. Is there really a singular purpose to dreams? I ask Konkoly. She sits back in her chair, hugging her knees against her chest, and thinks. What we refer to as dreaming, as if it were all one thing, is really many, she speculates. Nightmares, recurring dreams, dreams of embarrassment, and dreams of flying—each might have a different purpose, still unknown to us. We look back at the screen. Somewhere in there is the moment where I was digging with my son, burying something, under a lawn behind a house I do not recognize. “Maybe sometimes you do need to simulate social situations,” she says. “Sometimes you do need to understand the hierarchical meaning of your recent experience. And sometimes, you do need to jumble everything up, and forget.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/08/18/new-science-of-dreaming/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/08/18/new-science-of-dreaming/"},"headline":"The New Science of Dreaming","datePublished":"2026-08-18T12:00:04.377Z","dateModified":"2026-08-18T12:00:04.649Z","description":"Researchers are trying to decipher what dreams can tell us after dark.","url":"https://time.com/article/2026/08/18/new-science-of-dreaming/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt02f494e6b8c047ef/6a833d9fa4135acc4f9121d7/260907WDREAMS_006.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Veronique Greenwood","jobTitle":"","url":"https://time.com/author/veronique-greenwood/"}],"articleSection":"Health","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt02f494e6b8c047ef/6a833d9fa4135acc4f9121d7/260907WDREAMS_006.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"260907WDREAMS_006.jpg","caption":"","creditText":"","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/08/18/new-science-of-dreaming/","name":"The New Science of Dreaming"}}]}] ```