This Man Wants to Control Your Dreams

One morning in 1961, Leonid Rogozov woke up in agony.

As the only medical professional on a Soviet expedition to the depths of Antarctica, he self-diagnosed his searing pain as a case of acute appendicitis—a condition that could be fatal without immediate surgery. With no alternative, Rogozov prepared for an unthinkable solution: he would operate on himself.

Numbed by novocaine and assisted by his colleagues, Rogozov sliced through his own stomach, removed his infected appendix, and stitched himself back together. Remarkably, he survived. His audacious self-surgery was instantly seized upon by authorities in the USSR, and Rogozov became a poster boy of Soviet agitprop.

This tale has haunted renegade dream researcher Michael Raduga since he was a boy growing up in Russia. “From early childhood I was scared to death about this story,” he says over Zoom, a portrait of Freud hanging on the wall behind him. Yet, in 2022, Raduga did something equally ballsy: he used a household drill to bore a hole through his skull, and planted an experimental electrical chip inside his own brain.

The DIY surgery was yet another milestone in Raduga’s lifelong obsession with lucid dreaming—where you’re aware that you’re in a dream and can manipulate its course. His hope was that the chip would help him consciously enter this state.

Going into the procedure, Raduga had zero scientific qualifications—he watched YouTube tutorials and had practiced the drilling on dead sheep—but knew the experiment would take years to do legally on any willing subject other than himself. “The more I thought about and prepared for it, the more it became a normal thing,” he says. 

Despite all that mental preparation, the chip didn’t help Raduga achieve a lucid dream state; it just made the fingers on his left hand twitch. He also lost a litre of blood and was forced to go to hospital—so once he was discharged it was back to the drawing board.

Lucid dreaming has captured the zeitgeist over the last few years, with a string of new studies, start-ups and tech aiming to redefine our understanding of consciousness. The subreddit dedicated to the practice—with its 577,000 members—is absolutely thriving, as Web3 psychonauts explore new ways to unlock their brains, often alongside microdosing psychedelics and guided meditation (think of it as dreammaxxing).

The phenomenon may have gained traction in recent years, but it’s been documented for millennia. Aristotle first referenced it in writing in 350 BC, and in 1913 the term “lucid dream” was coined by psychiatrist Frederik Willem van Eeden. In 1987, Stephen LaBerge founded the Stanford Lucidity Institute, and since then has been widely regarded as the leading expert in the field. 

Lucid dreams aren’t exactly rare—one in two people will have one at some point over the course of their lives—but few manage to master this literal dark art to the point where they can actively induce them. Much of LaBerge’s work has sought to remedy that. The psychophysiologist has shown that using both intentional cognitive processes to return to your dream (remembered through mnemonics) and light cues (to signal you’re dreaming without waking you up) can help to generate them.

Building on this research, Michael Raduga came up with LucidMe, an AI-powered sleep mask that tracks eye movement and breathing. He claims the mask can help with insomnia, snoring, sleep inertia, meditation and—most strikingly––lucid dreaming. Given his skull-splitting past, it might be tempting to dismiss the man as merely a madcap inventor with a death wish. But he’s more complex than that. To some, he is a maverick. To others, a charlatan. Either way, for a man who has dreamt about the possibilities of dreaming almost all his waking life, Michael Raduga never seems to rest. 

Raduga was born in 1983 in Akademgorodok, Siberia. The settlement, whose name translates to “Academic Town”, was founded in 1957 to house the USSR’s top scientists and their families. Snow blankets its sprawling science and technology institutes, with temperatures plunging to -40°C in the harshest winter months. It’s Siberia’s Silicon Valley, with fewer start-ups and far more frostbite.

Despite the dissolution of the USSR, life in Siberia in the 1990s remained bleak and isolated, incubating a collective desire to escape. “The biggest reason I was so interested in dreams was because life in Russia then was so miserable,” says Raduga. “It was so grey, so hostile. People were trying to find something supernatural, anything to experience something better.”

Raduga grew up insecure and superstitious, unable to notice details but capable of imagining vast concepts. Reclusive and impressionable, he dreamt of experiencing the supernatural firsthand. He’s also sure he had lucid dreams as a child (he believes most of us do, but that we lose the memories as we grow up), but the first real experience he can recall was at 16, as described in his book The Phase. 

“I woke up in the middle of the night and opened my eyes. I had awakened unusually early, and my mind and senses were super sharp…they were pulling me up in their flying saucer. I felt my body levitate off the bed…my physical body went through the window pane, which I felt with each of my internal organs! Now finding myself on the other side of the window and in the starry, cold Siberian sky, I decided I wouldn’t be afraid anymore…”

Initially, Raduga thought he was experiencing either an alien abduction or astral projection—a term used by some esoteric spiritualists to describe an intentional out-of-body experience (OBE) during sleep, popularised in books with untraceable authors and mystical covers. Unlike lucid dreaming, where you’re conscious within the dream but still tethered to the physical body, astral projection is believed by many proponents to be a fully immersive experience. They claim that the soul truly leaves the body, floating above the bed or soaring through the bedroom window, traveling to distant places or even otherworldly realms. 

At first, Raduga was on board. “But eventually it appeared that the state was real and was happening in my brain,” he says. “It was a huge disappointment. I had imagined I was living in a few different worlds.”

However, the disappointment faded as Raduga began to believe that astral projection, OBEs, and lucid dreams were all one and the same, something he dubbed “The Phase.” 

“When you experience the Phase state, there’s nothing in common with [normal] dreams. It’s why so many people are confused and believe they go into another dimension,” he says. “At first they were quite scary. But then my fear disappeared and I wanted to experience them over and over again.”

After identifying The Phase, Raduga started writing a series of books explaining how to achieve it. In short, his method revolves around waking up during the REM phase of sleep—the stage where most dreams happen—staying awake for a few minutes and then intentionally re-entering your dream using an intricate series of meditative techniques. 

Moving to Moscow with this monomaniacal vision, Raduga hustled at publishing houses while working as a bouncer, clambering his way up the ladder. TV appearances and private seminars across Russia followed, before Raduga started hosting Phase School courses across the world to help his new cult following experience the elusive dream state for themselves.

“There is no difference for our brain between reality and what’s in ‘The Phase’.”

_{^{Michael Raduga}}

Believing he wouldn’t be taken seriously on the world stage if his research remained in Russia, Raduga began travelling to Los Angeles, conducting private experiments with intrepid volunteers from 2011 to 2013. During this time, he boldly concluded that The Phase could explain universal mysteries like religious miracles, alien abductions, and near-death experiences. All of them, he claimed, were just dreams. He also became convinced that The Phase offers perfect verisimilitude—when dreams are indistinguishable from waking life.

“There is no difference for our brain between reality and what’s in The Phase—your brain creates the same perception and sensations,” he says. “From a physiological standpoint, they’re all the same and should be studied simultaneously.”

When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February of 2022, Raduga moved to Kazakhstan, the closest country where you can apply for American citizenship. Left in temporary limbo while his paperwork was approved, he wanted to test whether stimulating the brain could induce lucid dreaming. It’s here that he got hold of a few sheep carcasses, picked up a drill and—well, you know the rest.

A year later, Raduga received a green card and moved to the actual Silicon Valley. There, he launched a new start-up, REMSpace, out of a lab in Redwood City, a sprawling downtown area surrounded by the giant trees that give the city its name. These days, he no longer has to escape the cold confines of Siberia through sleep, but he still finds lucid dreams just as enticing.

On Christmas Eve, a parcel arrives for me from California: a prototype of Raduga’s LucidMe. At first it looks like the kind of sleep mask you might get on a red-eye flight. But this early version unzips to reveal a chip board, the electric entrails that enable the mask to be connected to your phone, emit LEDs and track your sleep. While slightly scared it might explode in my face, I download the app, which allows you to customize the mask’s settings and share what you dream about with other Phasers.

The mask promises three routes into lucid dreaming: the Indirect Method, which wakes you up at a selected time and gives you audio cues to help you return to the dream; the Lucid Dream method, which sends signals during the REM stage; and the Direct Method, which ensures you maintain consciousness while falling asleep. All three can be turned off when you’re half-asleep, with two sharp exhales or a head movement. 

Over the next few weeks, I test out the mask on-and-off, to ensure I get at least a bit of actual sleep. It’s comfortable and intuitive, but I don’t have much luck with the lucid dreaming. A couple of times, the mask seems to lose connection to my phone during the night. Another time, I somehow sleep through the flashing lights and audio cue from an AI siren that purrs through the speakers, “You are in a dream.” Later, I wake up and find I’ve unconsciously taken the mask off. Then, it won’t turn on. Raduga sends me some troubleshooting advice, and—very fairly—reminds me that it’s a prototype.

As a problem sleeper, I’m also not the greatest guinea pig. I do have some luck one night without the mask, when I happen to wake up at around 6AM. Using Radgua’s indirect methods, I disassociate myself from my body and feel an intense, euphoric whoosh as I enter back into my dream, as if my consciousness has levitated towards the ceiling. Finding myself on the escalator of London Euston’s tube station, I realise I’m dreaming and change the faces of the commuters, ecstatically bounding towards the tunnel until an amorphous tube train alights at the platform and a blinding light wakes me up.

The LucidMe is not the first device of its kind. LaBerge released a mask, The NovaDreamer, way back in 1993. The Remee, a crude LED-based mask, came out to mixed reviews in 2012. And in 2020, MIT’s Dream Lab unveiled the Dormio, a piece of glove-like tech that monitors your heart rate and muscle movements to detect sleep stages, before triggering an audio recording with a desired dream topic. 

While the efficacy of Raduga’s methods have not been peer-reviewed or independently verified by the broader scientific community, he is confident of LucidMe’s superiority. “It’s 100% the most efficient mask right now,” he says, arguing that it builds on LaBerge’s own devices by offering more methods to induce lucid dreaming. The next version of the mask promises EEG (brain waves), EOG (eye movement) and EMG (muscle movement) tracking to monitor sleep cycles more accurately.

LucidMe is just the tip of the iceberg for Raduga. At $148, the mask is a relatively cheap way to supposedly bring lucid dreaming to the masses, while its other functions—like snore prevention—are essentially there to keep potential investors happy. Really, Raduga’s true focus lies in a series of experiments that have made headlines for their sensational claims.

Perhaps most astonishing is the assertion that two people managed to communicate while lucid dreaming. During an experiment in September of 2024, in which participants were hooked up to specially designed equipment, one person reportedly said a word within their dream, and a second confirmed that word after waking up. While the claim is yet to be peer-reviewed, REMspace describes it as the first successful example of two-way communication in a dream.

Another involves a system Raduga has developed called Remmyo, which aims to enable real-time communication during lucid dreaming. Unlike earlier, more simplistic methods, such as LaBerge’s use of Morse code to share words, Remmyo employs an alphabet built out of facial muscle movements that can be detected by EMG sensors. This also hasn’t been scientifically validated, but Raduga is optimistic. “Eventually, we will be able to read any language and transfer information to the server,” he says.

Unsurprisingly, these experiments have attracted mass skepticism. “Raduga’s group has pursued research directions that generate publicity and awareness, but he has released several press releases of unfinished, undocumented projects inaccurately represented as breakthroughs,” says dream researcher Karen Konkoly. “It’s wonderful to see the excitement surrounding lucid dreaming, but ensuring clarity of communication and safety in methods is paramount. Without proper documentation and peer-review, the validity of these press releases cannot be verified.” 

Konkoly does concede that it’s “reasonable to hypothesise that Raduga’s products can increase lucid dreaming to some degree”, but doesn’t rank them above the other masks currently on offer.

Others are more supportive. “The fact they’ve managed to slim down LaBerge’s mask is really good, so it’s less difficult to sleep,” says Professor Mark Blagrove, a dream researcher at Swansea University, who thinks most of Raduga’s tech stacks up and that the EMG functionality could viably take things further. “You would really get people paying for this if there was a possibility, like in the film Inception, that you could [communicate phrases and images] in your dreams.” 

Raduga acknowledges the criticism and accepts his lack of qualifications. “I’m not a scientist, I’m a researcher,” he says. “If nobody cites my paper it won’t change anything. I started this work because I was deeply unsatisfied and because it’s the only way to change something.” 

That said, some of Raduga’s work has featured in peer-reviewed papers, including International Journal of Dream Research and Dreaming. But he’s disillusioned by the fact that publishing papers hasn’t moved the needle. Caught between the demands of academics, who want to see evidence, and investors, who want to see profits, Raduga currently finds himself navigating a delicate balancing act.

“People will use [lucid dreaming] to accomplish things they cannot do in reality.”

^{Michael Raduga}

Either way, he’s adamant that lucid dreaming holds huge potential. “REM sleep technology is the next AI,” he says. “It’s an inevitable future. It will be extremely widespread and popular.” If we can trigger imagery or vocabulary, and extract data from people’s dreams in real-time, he suggests, the possibilities are endless.

“People will use it to accomplish things they cannot do in reality. It could be sexual fantasies or dreams. You won’t need to pay money to drive a Ferrari,” he says. But can’t VR do that? “You cannot really touch things, eat things, smell things, experience pain and pleasure [in VR],” he argues. “REM sleep is fully immersive.”

Communicating with others while we dream also holds real potential. Professor Blagrove imagines a scenario in which you ask, aloud in your lucid dream, where you should go on holiday. This is recorded by Raduga’s software and transmitted into a second person’s dream, allowing them to respond with a suggestion that is then plugged back into your dream. 

“It might not be an unbelievably high level of cognition, but it would be astounding. Even someone appearing in the other person’s dream opens up bonding with each other, like how people go on acid trips together,” he says, emphasising the emotional impact of shared dreams.

Cranking up the sci-fi dial one step further, we could conceivably communicate with long-distance lovers, or even those suffering from locked-in syndrome. Like VR, lucid dreaming could also offer therapeutic potential and the ability to visualise exposure to a phobia or open-up emotionally to virtual characters. Nightmares could be replaced by positive dreams that benefit our waking moods, and anxiety-prone individuals could receive reassuring dream cues.

But how about something to reassure those Silicon Valley investors? 

Raduga believes that business opportunities are boundless. After all, if we can consume content in our sleep, that content can be sponsored. “It opens the door to countless commercial applications, reshaping how we think about communication and interaction in the dream world,” he said in a 2024 press release. 

Previously, dream marketing has been toyed with through Targeted Dream Incubation, a technique where you focus on a specific issue before sleep to influence your dreams. In 2011, for a Super Bowl stunt, Coors recruited renowned dream academic Dr Deirdre Barrett to design a video and soundscape to be watched just before bed, to provoke dreams about beer. Responding to a 2021 survey, 77% of the 400 US companies surveyed said they planned to experiment with dream-marketing techniques by 2025—though none of that marketing appears to have materialised quite yet.

If this is sounding like a Black Mirror episode, it’s because it absolutely could be. Like all emerging technologies, there are some serious concerns to consider. First, there’s the risk that the pursuit of lucid dreaming could disrupt our sleep. Being constantly woken up isn’t exactly conducive to proper rest. “LucidME won’t wake you if your sleep is bad,” Raduga reassures me. The manual also suggests using it only for 20 minutes after you’ve had your usual amount of sleep, to avoid repeatedly waking yourself up.

Then there are the legal questions. What happens if you steal someone’s intellectual property in a dream? Or manipulate others into dreaming disturbing scenarios? “I’m pretty sure people will try to hack your dreams if you’re connected to the server,” Raduga says. Like AI, if meaningful breakthroughs are achieved, this technology could potentially advance much faster than the cultural and legal frameworks around it, leading to security threats and a complex web of ethical dilemmas.

Mind you, risk has always been Raduga’s thing. Spurred on by his supporters and an unwavering determination to help us take control of our dreams, the Russian inventor is resolute in his mission to make lucid dreaming a reality. “You won’t need to explain to people why they need this new technology. Everybody will take it,” he says. “It will be as normal as your cell phone.”

Follow Kyle MacNeill on Instagram @kyle.macneill