At the University of Bonn (Germany) they tried to explain why people who are born with deafness or paralysis feel full and healthy in their dreams and can perform fantastic tricks - for example, breathe underwater or fly.
How we perceive ourselves in reality and in a dream are different things. Our "mental" body, which operates in our dreams, is essentially static and never changes. This is the rationale for a study by Judith Koppehele-Gossel of the University of Bonn, who found that the perception of your body in a dream does not change depending on what happens to it in reality.
“Although we may be aware that we were running, swimming and just sitting somewhere in our dreams, and aware that we have a body, we can rarely feel or see it,” said Judith.
The study by Koppechele-Gossel and her colleagues continued an earlier experiment. In 2011, volunteers were asked to read other people's dream stories and try to determine which were healthy storytellers and which were disabled. Readers were unable to grasp the difference, Live Science reports.
These data suggest that people with paralysis who are deaf or dumb from birth “have dreams in which they move, speak and hear just like healthy people,” says Judith. Other studies have indirectly confirmed that a person has an "intact" body in sleep.
This time, the scientists wanted to answer the question under what circumstances external changes with the body can affect the alter ego in a dream.
For this, ten volunteers (seven women and three men) recorded their dreams for three months. In the first ten notes, they recorded everything they could remember in the morning. In the second stage, the scientists changed the order slightly: every evening before going to bed, the participants looked at their right hand for two minutes. With this condition, they recorded ten more dreams.
In the third part of the experiment, the volunteers put a red mark on their hand, asking them to focus on it before going to bed and remember ten more dreams. In addition to reports on dreams, volunteers completed questionnaires about their well-being during sleep, about the perception of their body and the sensations of dreams.
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The three stages did not show outstanding and striking differences in dreaming. “The main conclusion was that dreams are difficult to influence by self-hypnosis, concentration or experimental alternation,” said the psychologist.
Thus, the alter ego is a "stripped down" version of the dreamer: it is limited to some standard template that is the same for both disabled and healthy people."
Dreaming is a special state, because a person is aware of himself at a different level, where he has a "set of experiences and emotional reactions", but no past and future, as well as control over his actions. Experimental studies of the alter ego in dreams are necessary for psychologists to further characterize the various levels of human consciousness.