Researchers say they've successfully communicated with individuals inside their dreams

A group of scientists at Northwestern University are claiming that they successfully communicated with individuals in the throes of "lucid dreams," potentially suggesting a breakthrough in the study of the relatively poorly understood phenomenon of dreaming. 

Researchers at Northwestern "found that individuals in REM sleep can interact with an experimenter and engage in real-time communication," the university said in a press release announcing the findings.

Dreamers participating in the study were reportedly "capable of comprehending questions, engaging in working-memory operations, and producing answers."

In the study, the scientists note that dreams "take us to a different reality, a hallucinatory world that feels as real as any waking experience" and that "these often-bizarre episodes are emblematic of human sleep but have yet to be adequately explained."

The new findings "can enable a variety of practical applications and a new strategy for the empirical exploration of dreams," they write.