#151 - Meet the Greatest Lucid Dreaming Scientist You've Never Heard Of

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Karen Konkoly is a dream scientist who led the first study to hold a real-time, two-way conversation with a person inside a dream, putting maths problems to sleepers in REM and getting answers back through their eye movements. She is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cambridge Consciousness and Cognition Laboratory, completed her PhD in the Paller Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University, and has spent her career building tools to engineer dreams — from targeted lucidity reactivation for narcolepsy nightmares to planting unsolved problems into REM sleep. She has also asked a dream character to swap bodies with her, and woken up inside it. This is the strangest conversation we have had on the channel.

Expect to learn how scientists prove someone is awake inside a dream, why you still cannot fly in your own dream even when you know it is a dream, what happened when Karen swapped bodies with a dream character, whether time really slows down while you sleep, why practising darts in a lucid dream works about as well as practising awake, what galantamine and acetylcholine actually do to REM sleep, the exact protocol for having your first lucid dream, why Karen no longer believes lucidity is the key to consciousness, and much more…

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GS EPISODES MENTIONED

David Spiegel - World's Greatest Hypnosis Scientist Hijacks My Mind Live On Camera!: https://youtu.be/eCtRBZHIsgQ

GUEST LINKS

Personal Website: https://www.karenkonkoly.com/

Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=teYHEFIAAAAJ&hl=en

Cambridge Consciousness & Cognition Lab: https://www.ccc-lab.org/

Dust Systems (Dream Engineering): https://www.dust.systems/people/karen-konkoly

X: https://x.com/KarenKonkoly

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00:00 Trailer

0:03:18 What Lucid Dreaming Actually Is

0:05:37 Wake Back To Bed: The 4am Method

0:06:40 Why You Still Can't Fly In Your Own Dream

0:09:20 How You Prove Someone Is Lucid In A Dream

0:11:53 Are The Sleep Stages Even Real?

0:15:28 When A Dream Dissolves But You Don't Wake Up

0:19:19 The Reality Check You Can Do Tonight

0:21:00 Does Time Run Slower Inside A Dream?

0:24:45 Trying And Failing To Become Her Dog

0:26:10 Swapping Bodies With A Dream Character

0:27:51 Is Lucidity A Glitch In Consciousness?

0:33:37 Hyperphantasia And Maladaptive Daydreaming

0:37:53 Practising Darts While You're Asleep

0:41:52 When Lucid Dreaming Is A Bad Idea

0:46:09 Why A Giraffe Can't Appear While You're Awake

0:49:54 Galantamine, Acetylcholine And Dream Drugs

0:52:17 The Squat Experiment

0:58:38 The Full Protocol, Step By Step

1:04:55 What This Teaches Us About Consciousness

1:09:15 Who Are Your Dream Characters?

1:12:55 "You're Not You"

1:14:41 Hypnosis, David Spiegel And Lucid Dreaming

1:18:20 What She's Working On Next

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