The idea of controlling your dreams might sound like the plot of the latest science fiction blockbuster. But this mysterious gift is a reality for around 20 per cent of people, who are able to go on exciting trips in impossible worlds. Depicted in films such as'Inception', lucid dreaming could provide a useful link between the real world and the dream world. Scientists are trying to tap into the potential of lucid dreaming, helping people complete tasks like turning on lights or even driving virtual cars while asleep. Here are three tricks that could allow you to try it for yourself.

Why we dream is one of science's most perplexing mysteries, but a neuroscientist in the US thinks he finally has the answer. Erik Hoel, a research assistant professor of neuroscience at Tufts University in Massachusetts, has taken inspiration from artificial intelligence (AI) for his theory. In a new report, he argues that the often hallucinogenic, nonsensical quality of dreaming is like throwing in new, unexpected data to a neural network. Professor Hoel calls this the'overfitted brain hypothesis' – and argues that it keeps human minds from'fitting too well to their daily distribution of stimuli'. This illustration represents the overfitted brain hypothesis of dreaming, which claims that the sparse and hallucinatory quality of dreams helps prevent the brain from'overfitting' to its biased daily sources of learning Neural networks are a subset of machine learning and are at the heart of deep learning algorithms.

Cartilage in the brain morphs while we sleep – possibly explaining why a good snooze can help consolidate memories, a new study suggests. The neurons in our brains that exchange information and help us learn have a cartilage-like sheath around them, known as a perineuronal net (PNN). US researchers believe that sleeping loosens this net enough to make our strong memories stronger and our weak memories weaker, causing them to drop out. Using mice and brains from human donors, they worked out PNNs densities in brain regions involved in emotional memory processing during a day's body cycle. They found that PNNs change in their elasticity in a circadian manner – recurring naturally on a 24-hour cycle – but sleep deprivation can disrupt this cycle.

We forget most of our dreams when we wake thanks to a group of neurons that work while we sleep to purge our minds of unnecessary memories, scientists found. The neurons -- which carry messages from cells that make a hormone involved in both sleep and appetite -- are active in the REM phase of sleep in which we dream. The finding adds to previous research that showed that sleep is the time that we store memories from the day for the long-term. Researchers studied the neurons and hormone-making cells in mice, which they found to be more forgetful when the cells were artificially activated. REM -- or'rapid eye movement' -- sleep is one of the several sleep cycles the body goes through each night.

New research suggests that certain rapid eye movements could be a tell of the developmental disorder. These rapid eye movements the research investigates are not the well-known kind that are within the human sleep cycle, but rather are the movements our eyes make as we shift focus to another location in our field of vision. The saccades, as they are officially called, are an important neurological function that helps us interact with people and objects around us. "They are crucial for navigating, and also for orienting visual attention to spatial locations containing pertinent information," according to a study in the European Journal of Neuroscience, and in that way they may also provide some insight into autism. Read: Do the Genes for Autism Also Make You Smarter? "When these neural mechanisms fail, due to damage or disease or developmental disorder, the resultant changes in eye movements can suggest specific computational errors that may be responsible, and highlight brain regions where these computations are thought to occur," the authors explain. In healthy people, saccades are fast and accurate.