Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. I'm reclining in a large blue chair in a small dark room: earbuds in, tinted glasses on, eyelids closed. Clasping my head is a swimmer's cap of electrodes fastened under my chin. My fingers are wrapped in sensors.

It's a bit of a bummer that dreams are as fascinating as they are hard and expensive to study. Famed psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung may have made big names for themselves mining the meaning and significance of our dreams, but even today, with powerful brain-monitoring technology, it's tough to get a handle on what, exactly, is going on. Researchers, if they wait to wake up their subjects from sleep in the morning, have to contend with "rapid forgetting." A better method is to wake people up while they're dreaming, but this requires running a sleep lab, which doesn't offer that much of an advantage. The dreamers are groggy and still forgetful.

Researchers analyzed the brain signals and eye and facial movements of people engaged in lucid dreaming "conversations." In the movie Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio enters into other people's dreams to interact with them and steal secrets from their subconscious. Now, it seems this science fiction plot is one baby step closer to reality. For the first time, researchers have had "conversations" involving novel questions and math problems with lucid dreamers--people who are aware that they are dreaming. The findings, from four labs and 36 participants, suggest people can receive and process complex external information while sleeping.