Imagine walking up to someone and asking them a simple math question. Instead of answering, they burst into tears, run away, or tell you the answer is too personal to share.
Now imagine that person doesn’t exist. They’re a character in your dream, a product of your own brain.
Almost every night, we interact with people who exist only in our minds. They talk, argue, laugh, and sometimes behave in ways that catch us entirely by surprise. But here’s a fascinating question: If our brains are creating these characters, why don’t we know what they’re going to say? How can our own brain surprise us every single night?
A handful of wonderfully creative studies have explored this question by asking lucid dreamers—people who know they are dreaming while still asleep—to strike up conversations with their imaginary companions and report what happened.
In an early study, one dreamer asked a character whether it had consciousness. The response? “I am sure that I have a consciousness, but I doubt if you have one, because you ask me such stupid questions!” Cheeky!
Dream Characters Are Terrible at Math (and Sometimes Very Sensitive About It)
In a 2010 pilot study, researchers asked lucid dreamers to seek out a wise “guide” in their dream to help them tackle puzzles or invent metaphors1.
The dream guides were not exactly logic champions: They supplied just one correct answer in 11 encounters involving logical puzzles. However, their advice on creative tasks was more promising. When asked to produce metaphors for unlikely scenes like a child playing in a cemetery, a dream guide responded, “a flower growing on waste land.” Not bad for a made-up character. The authors summarized their pilot study with an intriguing conclusion: Dream characters may be more helpful with imaginative associations than with step-by-step logic.
To follow up on this idea, the researchers conducted another study in which they instructed lucid dreamers to ask their characters if they could solve simple arithmetic problems2.
Here again, dream characters were not particularly gifted mathematicians. They got only about a third of their responses correct, even struggling with calculations as simple as 3+4.
But their reactions to the questions were even more interesting. When asked to solve 8+2, one dream character appeared irritated, as though the dreamer had asked something forbidden, before delivering the mysterious response, “Gray zone.”
Another character, asked to calculate 18 minus 6, refused to answer, apparently treating the result as highly confidential information. In other dreams, characters simply fled the scene. One even started crying.
Apparently, being asked to do mental arithmetic can be just as unpleasant for imaginary people as it is for real ones.
From brain imaging data, we know that solving mathematical calculations involves a set of regions in the frontal and parietal parts of the brain. During REM sleep, in which lucid dreams typically occur, these regions are relatively deactivated. This might explain why mathematical operations are beyond the reach of the dream world.
Can Dream Characters Read Our Minds?
In 2014, researchers asked lucid dreamers to perform a different task3. They were instructed to hold up a number of fingers behind their backs and ask dream characters to guess how many they were showing.
In waking life, if you were to try to guess how many fingers your friend is holding behind their back (i.e., guessing a number between 0 and 10), you would have roughly a 9 percent chance of getting it right.
In the dream world, however, characters correctly identified the hidden number 66 percent of the time. Remarkably, the characters were almost as successful at identifying hidden fingers as they were at counting fingers held directly in front of them.
In a second experiment, the researchers reversed the challenge. Dream characters were asked to write down a number, and dreamers attempted to guess it. The dreamers succeeded in approximately 71 percent of completed trials.
Does this mean dream characters possess extraordinary mind-reading abilities?
Not quite.
After all, both the dreamer and the character are creations of the same sleeping brain. Information that appears hidden from one character may still be accessible to the neural processes generating the entire experience.
These were small, exploratory studies based on self-reported dreams, but they still raise a fascinating question: How does the brain distribute information between the different characters it creates, and why can we access some information about other characters (like in the number guessing task) but stay completely in the dark about their knowledge otherwise?
When Your Imaginary Friends Have Had Enough of You
In the last task I want to share with you, dream researcher Antonio Zadra teamed up with an experienced lucid dreamer and visual artist, Dave Green4. Green spent two years approaching characters in his dreams and asking them to draw something.
You might expect these imaginary artists to be cooperative. After all, they’re being generated by the very artistic brain making the request.
You would be wrong.
Several characters were annoyed by the request; two girls giggled and insisted that Green had already asked them to draw on a previous occasion. Another character began writing mathematical equations instead of drawing. When Green pressed her to produce an actual picture, a second character intervened to defend her: “Look mate, you asked the lady to do a drawing and she did one, now leave her alone.”
Apparently, even our imaginary friends have boundaries.
Green also experienced more cooperative characters. In one dream, he met a character that looked like a professor. The character said he was in too much of a rush to draw. But then Green explained what the experiment was about, and the character replied, “How fascinating!” and enthusiastically took the pen and started to draw (you can see drawing examples in the fourth reference below). Green even got a golden retriever to produce artwork using its paw.
Interestingly, one character drew an image that appeared upside down from Green’s perspective, as though the character was genuinely seeing the page from a first-person point of view. Green’s brain wasn’t merely inventing dialogue. It appeared capable of constructing multiple perspectives within the same imaginary world.
Who Is Writing the Script?
These studies reveal something remarkable about dreaming: While we sleep, our brains create elaborate social worlds populated by characters who seem to behave autonomously and independently of the dreamer, guided by their own personalities, emotions, and private thoughts.
And even when we know perfectly well that we’re dreaming, we often have no idea what these characters will say next. Think about it: A lucid dreamer has mustered enough consciousness to become aware of the dream and exert volitional control over their own thoughts and behaviors, and still dream characters continue in an almost parallel world inaccessible to even the lucid ones.
This doesn’t mean dream characters possess independent consciousness. But it does suggest that the brain can generate complex social interactions outside the dreamer’s conscious awareness.
It is still an open question whether having the brain keep much of the dream “script” outside of our awareness is part of the functional significance of dreams. Some theories suggest that believing our dream experiences and reacting to them in potentially adaptive ways plays a central role in the evolutionary function of dreams. Just as we can never be sure what awaits us next in waking life, dreams are constructed with an unknown future, often even more shifty and unpredictable than wakeful reality.
What these small, exploratory studies demonstrate most clearly is how little we still understand about the extraordinarily rich world our brains create every night.
The next time you find yourself lucid dreaming, try asking someone a question.
Just maybe don’t start with math.
