Researchers for a California start-up claim they achieved the first-ever communication between two humans while dreaming, in what they dubbed a “historic milestone” that “could unlock new dimensions.”
REMspace, a San Francisco Bay Area-based neurotech company focused on lucid dreaming and sleep enhancement, shared that they have now twice had “two individuals successfully induced lucid dreams and exchanged a simple message.”
The company claimed the participants were sleeping at their homes on Sept. 24 when their specially developed “apparatus” remotely tracked their polysomnographic data through WiFi — recording their brain waves, blood oxygen levels, heart rate, and breathing during sleep.
After the company’s server detected that one of the candidates had entered a lucid dream state, it generated a random word and repeated it to him via earbuds.
The company has not shared the word, which was allegedly only known to the participant and repeated in his dream state, but his response was then recorded and stored on their server.
Eight minutes later, the second candidate entered a lucid dream, and the server transmitted the stored message to them, which they repeated upon waking up — marking the first-ever “chat” exchanged in dreams.
“Researchers at REMspace have achieved a historic milestone, demonstrating that lucid dreams could unlock new dimensions of communication and humanity’s potential,” the company said about last month’s experiment.
Lucid dreaming occurs when a person is aware that they are dreaming while asleep. According to the Cleveland Clinic, it usually happens during REM sleep, when the most vivid dreams occur.
Lucid dreaming allows a person to perform self-directed actions in their dreams rather than randomly interacting and reacting in their dreams without any sense of control.
Following the success of the first experiment, REMspace CEO Michael Raduga claimed the company achieved communication with two other individuals again on Oct. 8.
“Yesterday, communicating in dreams seemed like science fiction. Tomorrow, it will be so common we won’t be able to imagine our lives without this technology,” Raduga said in a press release.
“This opens the door to countless commercial applications, reshaping how we think about communication and interaction in the dream world.”
Raduga, 40, said the company believes “REM sleep and related phenomena, like lucid dreams, will become the next big industry after AI.”
Though the start-up has not disclosed how the technology in its “specially designed equipment” works, REMspace announced on Facebook last week that the “paper on communication within lucid dreams has already been written and submitted for review to a scientific journal” and that it “anticipates its publication within the next 2 to 6 months.”
However, there is no indication that scientists have reviewed the technology externally yet, and it has never been replicated.
Raduga told ABC 7 last week that he expects “technologies” like his company’s equipment “to be as common as your cell phone” in a few years.
“People won’t be able to imagine their life without this, because it will make their life so much more vibrant, so different,” he told the outlet.
“It will improve the quality of their life so much that people won’t imagine their life without technologies like this. We just need to improve them, and it’s just a matter of time.”
Raduga said REMspace, which was founded in Russia in 2007 and moved to the US five months ago, is now looking for more candidates who are experienced in lucid dreams or display potential for further trials.
Raduga is known for his bizarre sleep experiments.
Last year, the Russian-born CEO was hospitalized after drilling a microchip into his skull to control his dreams.
Raduga inserted the chip after watching hours of neurosurgery videos on YouTube and testing the life-threatening procedure on five sheep despite having no neurosurgery qualifications.
The chip was removed just five weeks after it was self-implanted.
