Sleep is a semi-conscious state, but there are neurons firing in the brain even when everything seems quiet. Now, brain activity during the deepest stage of sleep could make it possible for humans to interact with the waking world during lucid dreaming.
When someone is lucid dreaming, they are aware that they are dreaming and they can manipulate what is happening in the dream. Sleep expert Michael Raduga of the Phase Research Center has developed a “language” intended to help people communicate in that state. Called Remmyo, the first language of its kind, it relies on specific facial muscle movements that can occur during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. Remmyo can be learned overnight just like any other language. Anyone capable of lucid dreaming may be able to communicate in Remmyo while asleep.
“You can convey all the important information from lucid dreams with no more than three letters in a word,” Raduga, who founded Phase Research Center in 2007 to study sleep, told Ars. “This level of optimization took a lot of time and intellectual resources.”
Achieve clarity
The transition from lighter sleep stages to REM sleep takes about 90 minutes. REM sleep causes a state of sleep paralysis – arm and leg muscles cannot move, preventing us from reenacting what is happening in the dream. Meanwhile, brain waves, heart rate, and blood pressure all become similar to the levels seen in the waking state. Breathing becomes faster and more erratic. Although the eyelids remain closed, the sleeper’s eyes constantly move from side to side, giving the state its name.
This is when most dreams occur, including lucid dreams. Those are still a mystery, but it’s thought to be a hybrid of the waking and sleeping states.
Remmyo consists of six sets of facial movements that can be detected by electromyography (EMG) sensors on the face. Light electrical impulses that reach the facial muscles allow them to move during sleep paralysis, and these are picked up by sensors and transferred to software that Remmyo can type, vocalize and translate. Translation depends on which Remmyo letters are used by the sleeper and picked up by the software, which already has information from multiple dictionaries stored in its virtual brain. It can translate Remmyo into another language while being “spoken” by the sleeper.
“We can digitally pronounce Remmyo or its translation in real time, which helps us hear speech from lucid dreams,” Raduga said.
For his first experiment, Raduga used the sleep lab at the neurological clinic at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. His subjects had already learned Remmyo and had also been trained to enter a state of lucid dreaming and indicate that they were in that lucid state during REM sleep. As they were immersed in lucid dreams, EMG sensors on their faces sent information from electrical impulses to the translation software.
Not ready for prime time
The results were uncertain. Based on attempts to translate planned sentences, Remmyo was found to be anywhere from 13 to 81 percent effective, and in the interview, Raduga said he was skeptical of the translation software’s effectiveness during the peer review process of his study, which now published in the journal Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research and Practice. He still looks forward to making results more consistent in the future by taking translation methods to the next level.
“The biggest problem is that it’s hard to use just one muscle on your face to say something in Remmyo,” he said. “People unintentionally strain more than one muscle and EMG sensors detect all of them. Now we only use handwritten algorithms to solve the problem, but we will use machine learning and AI to improve Remmyo decoding.”
While Remmyo is completely new and has never been tested before, there have been other attempts to communicate with humans during REM sleep. A 2021 Northwestern University study found that people with particularly realistic dreams (and sometimes lucid dreams) were able to communicate with researchers who were awake through eye and muscle movements. Although no specialized sleep language was used during this experiment, it still showed that they could connect with the waking world.
Raduga’s study is the first to attempt to develop this type of communication into a general language. As he continues to develop Remmyo translation software, he predicts that what sounds like science fiction will soon go mainstream. “It’s much harder than you can imagine,” he said. “But communication between sleeping people will become a regular thing.”
Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 2023. DOI: 10.1037/cns0000353
Elizabeth Rayne is a creature that writes. Her work has appeared on SYFY WIRE, Space.com, Live Science, Grunge, Den of Geek, and Forbidden Futures. When she’s not writing, she’s transforming, drawing, or cosplaying as a character she’s never heard of before.
