Dream Hacking: 3 Groundbreaking Experiments

Watch the first-ever video documenting live two-way dream communication.

Have you ever felt drawn toward choices without knowing why? Or, as seen in the movie “Inception,” have you ever felt like you’ve woken up with a decision that’s already been made for you?

Neuroscience is beginning to demystify such feelings. Our agency and decisions, it turns out, can be measurably influenced by events that evade the conscious part of our brains. We’ll see three groundbreaking experiments that illustrate that influences we are unaware of in our waking life, during dreamless sleep, or even in our dreams, can impact our memory and behavior.

Published on February 18, 2021, in the journal Current Biology, an international team of scientists have found a bridge to the dream world by showing that it’s possible to have a direct dialogue with someone in their dream—and NOVA’s Greg Kestin (host of “What the Physics?!”) was given exclusive access.

The scientific context and potential effect of this team’s work are built up in the film through two related groundbreaking experiments. These experiments also show how scientists can influence your decisions, desires, and habits without you being aware.

PRODUCTION CREDITS:

Produced & Directed by Greg Kestin

Senior Digital Producer
Ari Daniel

Executive Producers
Julia Cort and Chris Schmidt

Research Interns
Rachel Swansburg
Saoirse Loftus-Reid

Camera
Greg Kestin
Emily Zendt
Christina Monnen
Aaron Fillo

Consultants/Advisors:
Christof Koch
Roger Koenig-Robert
Philip Pärnamets
Anat Arzi
David Kestin
Lissy Herman
Jay Gottfried
Petter Johansson
Lars Hall

Experiment Participants:
Nicholas Croce
Diara Townes
Michelle Lee

Special Thanks:
Casey Tobias
Zach Huber
Brianna Veal
Julie Elsky
Kurtis DeSousa
Carol Rhu
Catherine Hua
Gina Varamo
Northwestern University
Susan Florczak
Karina Montelongo
Sierra Whaley
Irish Village
Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York
Shantal Riley
Jennifer Dale

Music: APM
Stock footage: Videoblocks, Pond 5

Funding by:
Foundational Questions Institute
Franklin Fetzer Fund

This project was supported by grant number FQXi-RFP-1822 from the Foundational Questions Institute and Fetzer Franklin Fund, a donor advised fund of Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

© WGBH Educational Foundation 2021

[clintonallen]

I was so scared of failing the FE exam that I studied day and night for 6 months. I studied so hard for the exam, that I started taking the practice exams in my dreams.. remembering each question and answer word for word and actually choosing the right answer.

When it came time to take the exam, I finished within an hour and passed in the top 10% of my class. 😳 I'll never forget that, crazy.

[UniquilibriuM]

I've been lucid dreaming for 40 years. This is quite a vindicating study. I have communicated verbally with my wife, while at the same time speaking to someone in my dream. I still have amazing lucid dreams to this day. I actually learn things in my dreams and have even pulled creative writing from within my dream space. It is one of the best parts of my life experience.

[GregKestin]

Hi, I'm the Director/Producer of this short documentary. Feel free to ask me questions!

[hannabaal]

I had lucid dreams for years when I was in my 30's and 40's, and could control aspects of my dream. I usually ended up flying because it didn't wake me up like other choices did.

[christopherbarber]

I feel like this is a more disturbing breakthrough than people are realizing. Advertising is already crazy targeted now. We gotta pioneer some meditative techniques to resist the kind of brain manipulation advertising will undoubtedly employ if they haven’t started utilizing this research already

[JerryGrannanMusic]

Great, so 5 years from now as soon as I get to the most epic part of my lucid dream, a coca-cola ad is going to play.

[NickRoman]

This reminds me of the movie Jexi. It's like, computer: would you like coke or pepsi?
guy: coke
computer: you chose pepsi
And then it places the order and ships the pepsi. There's being crappy software that gets it wrong. And then there's being manipulative software that takes away your control. This of course is even more insidious.

[KarstenJohansson]

I have lucid dreams fairly often, but I'm not as "good" at it as some people who have full control. They normally happen between 5 and 7 in the morning, according to the times I end up waking up during one. I can "rerun" parts I don't like so they turn into something I like more, which is a lot like day dreaming but way more immersive, and I can purposely do things I want as long as they aren't so abrupt or intense that it wakes me up. Trying anything complicated is out of the picture... The details I come up with in those dreams are often things I doubt I'd ever come up with while awake, and the details are better than Hollywood. But if I think too hard about it, I invariably wake up - sometimes missing out on finishing a really great dream. Sometimes dreams I consider dull or stupid, but can't alter into something better for whatever reason, aggravate me and I wake up annoyed.

I seem to be at least partly aware of time in my sleep, too. If I dream about a specific time on a clock, when I wake up it is often extremely close to that time. That really surprises me.

[ThePrader]

I first became "aware" that I had lucid dreams, and that I could "direct", or control, them while in law school. During my 1st year as a law student we read law books, cases, 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, for months. "The law" literally was all I did. Then during the spring of my 1L year I began to wake up during my "law dreams" with the answer to the problem I had been reading about hours before. Fearing ridicule, I told no one. I would even study the law while asleep. Crazy ?? I used these dreams as a tool to remember complex issues and to "reason" out a solution. I can still do this 45 years after I graduated from law school, with honors.

[persephone]

I've been lucid before while dreaming, quite a few times. And "Inception" got right when they spoke about a dream within a dream. Any time I've been able to realize I was dreaming, I was in 2 "layers" of dreams, and the first one was basically indistinguishable from reality. In that first dream, I literally am myself as I am in reality, laying in bed... and going to sleep. Only through a dream like that have I been able to wake up in the second layer of dreaming and lucid dream. Sometimes I wake up in the first layer of my dream, but I easily go back to sleep there and re-enter my lucid dream.

[loxleymoon]

Just so cool. 10 years from now, this breakthrough will unlock knowledge we could never have imagined. Carl Jung would be flipping out!

[joshfisidi]

I’ve been doing this for years and have gotten over multiple bad habits through dream manipulation

[rdean]

For me, the tests for whether I'm dreaming are: 1) try to turn off the lights in the room you are in. Changing the lighting of the world is hard, so light switches rarely work. 2) Try to read a clock. Do you understand what it means? Even digital clocks are hard to grok, but traditional analog clocks are pure nonsense. 3) Try to read a book. Even just a few sentences. Do the characters on the page make sense? And if you think you understand them, are you legitimately taking in external information, or are you struggling to force your own meaning or story onto the shifting gibberish you are looking at?
For several years when I was lucid dreaming a lot, my test became to simply test whether I had powers. The most common was essentially equivalent to Luke Skywalker pulling his lightsaber to him with the force. A sort of clumsy, crude telekinesis where I could pull things toward me with my mind. But if that worked, and if I was lucky enough to not wake up after that, well that's when the fun began.

[SolaceEasy]

The deeper I look for me, I find no one is there.

[elberethreviewer]

I have lucid dreams and have been playing around with them my whole life. I can't control everything in my dreams but I can control some of it. I would love to see more videos on this.

[Akunumbers]

When i see term "Hacking" related to science i always think, that maybe time when science was a tool to emancipate humans has long gone, and now it serves only hierarchies that want to exploit more and more from simple unsecure individual..But beside this - it is really cool.)

[SamIIs]

Wow it really works, I clicked onto this video because of the picture of the girl on the shortcut and I wanted to see if she was in the video but she isn't I was manipulated.

[jordanvalladores]

Several years ago, i've been lucid dreaming of My self . learning how to drive a Manual Clutched motorcycle. That happened in my dreams many times, because that time. I really wanted to learn how to drive a motorcycle with a clutch... And as time passed by. I was able to have a chance to drive a clutched motorcycle, and out of nowhere. I realized that i already know how to drive a freaking clutched motorcycle...

Maybe if you really want to learn something in real life.. You can learn it in your dreams.

[NRG]

You know their research is Og when you see them using Windows XP

[intellectus]

When you cannot sleep at home on your bed and they ask you to sleep in the MRI machine.