For years, scientists have tried to delve into the intricacies of the brain to study patterns of dreams. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute in Munich say that people could soon be able to record their dreams and see what they had dreamed about the next day.

Scientists have already been able to show the considerable amount of activity that occurs in the brain when an individual is dreaming. This is especially true in the case of lucid dreamers. Lucid dreamers are those people who while dreaming that they are dreaming. They can also control their dreams.

Lucid dreaming is a skill that can be learned and is very useful to scientists who want to study dreams.

In a study conducted on six individuals, who were lucid dreamers, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and near infrared spectroscopy were used to monitor their brain activity when they were awake. Then they compared the results of the imaging and scanning with results from when they were doing the same things in a dream.

The participants had to fall off to sleep in a scanner and reach the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep and then finally reach a stable lucid dream state.

The researchers were able to compare brain activity of lucid dreamers with the help of brain imaging, in situations where they had the same thoughts while asleep and when they were awake. They found that although the signals in the brain were weaker during sleep, they were definitely similar to signals when the individual was awake.

"The main obstacle in studying specific dream content is that spontaneous dream activity cannot be experimentally controlled, as subjects typically cannot perform pre-decided mental actions during sleep," study researcher Michael Czisch said in a statement.