Dreams are periods of mental activity that occur during sleep in which the sleeping person experiences imagination and visions. The science behind dreams is limited, and the exact function remains unclear – but research has shed light on some of the mechanisms behind dreaming. Long considered an intensely subjective and deeply personal experience, dreams are slowly opening out to research methodology and in the process spilling the secrets of consciousness, volitionand the nature of imaginary worlds. At the absolute cutting edge of dream research today lies the study of an elusive and unusual type of dream called a ‘lucid dream’. Simply put, a lucid dream in which he knows, at the time of the dream, that one is dreaming and that one can then control the course of the dream. Although only a small percentage of people have lucid dreams, there are now methods available that can induce such dreams in people. Keath Hearne of the University of Hull and Stephan LaBerge of Standford University, California, realized that if a person (who was conscious that he or she was dreaming) could somehow communicate to the outside world, it would open a whole new process of dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious. Hearne exploited the fact that in dream sleep, the eyes move. He thought perhaps a lucid dreamer could signal by moving the eyes in a predetermined pattern and, in 1980, succeeded in making a volunteer move his eyes left and right eight times in succession. From there it was a simple step to use the movements in Morse code to make whole sentences. One of the next steps envisaged is to link the Morse signals to a speech synthesizer for a real conversation to take place. What can we expect to get out of all this? For one thing, there is a great debate going on at present about the nature of dreams that could possibly be resolved. An older school still clings to the Freudian viewpoint of dreams being representations of unconscious wish fulfilment symbolism while another newer one maintains they are nothing more than random electrochemical bursts which the brain then does its best to put into some sort of coherent scenario as visual imagery. If a person could talk about what he or she is seeing while it is happening, dream interpretation could finally take place with the dreamer participating in real-time. On the other hand, investigators could try to stimulate various areas of the brain through electrodes to see what, if any, effect it has on the content of dreams while getting simultaneous feedback from the dreamer. This could lend support to their theory.