Hijack your own dreams to improve your skills

Saw this article in New Scientist today.  It's an interesting concept and one that follows on from my previous post re sleep paralysis (see The waking nightmare of sleep paralysis, from August 2011 - http://tinypiney.blogspot.com/2011/08/waking-nightmare-of-sleep-paralysis.html)

This part really interested me:

Is dream time the same as real time?

Upon waking from a particularly vivid dream, it can feel as though you have been through a lifetime in one night. In the film Inception, characters can achieve an hour's worth of activity in a dream that actually lasts 5 minutes. However, research suggests that the reverse is true when dreaming.

Daniel Erlacher, now at the University of Bern in Switzerland, and his colleagues gave 15 lucid dreamers tasks to perform in their dreams. In separate experiments, each participant counted to 10, 20 or 30 and walked 10, 20 or 30 steps.

The dreamers signalled their progress through eye movements. These were recorded using an electro-oculogram, which monitors changes in electrical activity as the eye moves between two fixed points. Dreamers signalled that they had begun the task by looking in one direction and finished looking in the other. The researchers ensured participants were asleep by recording brain and muscle activity.

Both tasks took longer for the dreamers to perform while asleep. The participants took around 30 per cent longer to count and 50 per cent longer to walk in their dreams than they did while they were awake. The findings were presented at the 2010 annual conference of the North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity in Tuscon, Arizona.

"There may be a cognitive slowing in the simulated dream world," says Erlacher. "It's the opposite of what happens in Inception."

To read the article in full follow the link in the title.