\u201cI was in my dorm room in Rochester, and I sat up in bed,\u201d Carr recalls over Zoom from her office at the University of Montreal<\/a>. \u201cI realized I was dreaming, and I looked down and could see my sleeping body lying in bed. I stood up and walked over to the wall and to the desk. I was just looking at the dream because I was so shocked at how my mind was doing this. I thought, \u2018It looks so real<\/em>.\u2019 It was like that scene in Inception<\/em> where [Saito] looks at the carpet very closely. That was the whole dream. I just looked at the wall and the desk, and I was like, \u2018This is possible.\u2019<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n What Carr was experiencing had a name\u2014lucid dreaming, the state in which a person becomes aware, mid-dream, that they are dreaming\u2014though she didn\u2019t know it yet. Or that deciphering experiences like the one she\u2019d just had would become her life\u2019s work.<\/p>\n Today, Carr is one of a small global cohort of researchers who call themselves dream engineers\u2014scientists who apply techniques and technologies to influence, record, and manipulate the content of dreams to benefit memory, creativity, or well-being. She helped coin the term, organized the first Dream Engineering Workshop, and late last year released the first book to bring dream engineering to a mainstream audience. The field was galvanized by that first lucid dream but its roots, in fact, run much deeper.<\/p>\n Carr grew up in Corning, New York, a small city about 100 miles south of Rochester, with two brothers and parents who highly valued education\u2014her mother taught special education in the local school district and her father rose to vice president at Corning Community College. At around age three, she was diagnosed with moderate hearing loss\u2014a difficulty hearing higher frequencies, and consonants in particular, that requires her to wear hearing aids in order to understand speech\u2014and the family began making regular trips to Rochester, a hub for audiology care and home to one of the largest per capita Deaf and hard-of-hearing populations in the country<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI was just looking at the dream because I was so shocked at how my mind was doing this. I thought, \u2018It looks so real<\/em>.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Equipped with what she describes as a \u201cvery, very vivid\u201d imagination, Carr was drawn to both science and the arts. She was captivated by biology and harbored ambitions of becoming a writer. Dreams were a defining presence in her childhood, too\u2014some pleasant, others so troubling that she would lie awake for hours to avoid sleep. Her first science project, predictably enough, tackled the subject head-on.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was the first time the teacher was like, \u2018You have to find your sources in the library and give a poster presentation to the class.\u2019 So I guess I was always interested in dreams because that was the topic that I chose,\u201d Carr recalls, laughing. \u201cI just remember every single person in the class asked me a question afterward. Mostly, it was the typical, \u2018I have this dream; what does it mean?\u2019 Which is still what everybody does when they find out what I do.\u201d<\/p>\n Carr was 15 when she experienced the first of what would become frequent episodes of sleep paralysis\u2014when the natural muscle paralysis that occurs during REM sleep seeps into a dream. \u201cA shotgun fires my mind into a sudden awakening, but my body does not jolt from the recoil,\u201d she described one such episode for an undergraduate writing assignment. \u201cWhat was that?<\/em> It\u2019s pitch black but for a thin line of foggy light coming through the forced squint of my eyelids. I can\u2019t move. Why can\u2019t I move?!<\/em> I must be tied down. I must be paralyzed, or dead. My eyes . . . won\u2019t open!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n More frightening than nightmares, Carr\u2019s sleep paralysis often involved a demon-like creature pressing so hard on her chest that it felt like it was squeezing the life right out of her. When she shared her experiences with a few friends, no one seemed to understand or recognize what was happening. (Even her professor would later tell her it sounded \u201ctoo fictional\u201d for a nonfiction writing assignment.) It was only when she went to [the early search engine] Ask Jeeves that she learned the term \u201csleep paralysis\u201d\u2014and that she was far from alone in suffering it. \u201cThe bad news was that a select few unlucky people go on to experience sleep paralysis regularly throughout their lives, and there was no known cure or treatment,\u201d she wrote. \u201cI was to become one of those people.\u201d<\/p>\n When Carr arrived at URochester as a first-year student in the fall of 2006, she planned to major in biology. But an Intro to Cognition class prompted her to switch immediately to brain and cognitive sciences. \u201cThere\u2019s the classic gorilla experiment<\/a> where they show you what the attentional blink is. You\u2019re watching people play with a ball and then a gorilla walks through the scene\u2014you don\u2019t even notice it because you\u2019re paying attention to the ball,\u201d she says. \u201cI was just fascinated to learn that everyone\u2019s mind is doing this. Everything seems so concrete and so stable and solid, but it\u2019s really illusory\u2014we\u2019re fabricating what we perceive in some way. And I think that ties into dreaming quite a bit.\u201d<\/p>\n Carr got her first taste of research as a sophomore intern in the Sleep and Neurophysiology Research Lab<\/a> under psychiatry professor Wilfred Pigeon<\/a>. She recalls participating in one overnight study\u2014\u201cjust for fun\u201d\u2014but mostly cleaning data, reviewing scientific literature, and performing other entry-level tasks as needed. \u201cShe was one of these very motivated students who, I think, knew from early on that she was going to graduate school,\u201d says Pigeon. \u201cShe was the kind of person who would always ask, \u2018Is there anything else I can do?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Carr worked in three other labs as an undergraduate, studying everything from visual cognition to video games and infant-mother attachment, while satisfying her love of the arts through clusters in photography, creative writing, tai chi, and drum circles. \u201cI think a huge strength of going to school there was just the amount of opportunities available,\u201d she says. \u201cI also really liked that side of U of R, how much the arts and creativity and the humanities were valued in concert with science and psychology. That, to me, is dream science\u2014it\u2019s something that\u2019s ephemeral and hard to describe, but we\u2019re also trying to study it very scientifically through the brain and understand what\u2019s happening. I really appreciate being able to straddle those two worlds.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFlying is the first trick everyone learns, and once you do, that\u2019s your transport mode of choice\u2014forever.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Over the years, Carr also became something of an expert in lucid dreaming. After that first experience, she read everything on the topic she could find. She learned about ancient religions that used the practice to harness altered states of consciousness or prepare for death. She even conducted her own experiments, learning how to move around inside her dreams (\u201cFlying is the first trick everyone learns, and once you do, that\u2019s your transport mode of choice\u2014forever\u201d) or practice skills, like tai chi, that she was studying in her waking life. Perhaps most significantly, she discovered she could use lucid dreaming to confront, and even transform, her most distressing nightmares and fears.<\/p>\n But finding a graduate program where she could study dreams\u2014not just sleep, not just neuroscience, but dreams\u2014turned out to be harder than she expected. Unwilling to compromise, she cold emailed a dozen researchers she found through the International Association for the Study of Dreams<\/a> (IASD). \u201cIs there anywhere I can actually study dreams?\u201d Several people told her no, but four or five pointed her to the same place: the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory at the University of Montreal<\/a>, run by a researcher named Tore Nielsen<\/a>. She applied\u2014very late, as it turned out\u2014and was accepted into the graduate program.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s funny. I found the email I wrote to [Nielsen] before I even started, with a long list of the topics I was interested in at the time. I could have written it today,\u201d Carr says. \u201cI\u2019m interested in how dreaming is related to mental health and well-being\u2014how we can interact with our dreams, gain insight from them, and try to make them more positive. But also the more functional mechanisms of sleep: How is dreaming related to memory consolidation during sleep? How is it related to what\u2019s happening in the body?\u201d<\/p>\n Carr spent five years in Montreal, impressing Nielsen with her calm demeanor and inquisitive mind. \u201cUnlike me, she was quite confident in lucid dreaming being accepted by other, non-dream-oriented researchers as a legitimate area of science,\u201d he says. \u201cComing from a background heavily steeped in behaviorism, I never had this kind of confidence. At the same time, I came to appreciate that Michelle had very good ideas about the possible functions of dreams and nightmares.\u201d<\/p>\n Some of those ideas were published in a joint paper with Nielsen on sensory processing sensitivity and nightmare sufferers. Others reached a different audience entirely through a Psychology Today<\/em> blog<\/a> Carr maintained for several years, translating dream science research for general readers\u2014an early sign that her interests extended beyond the\u00a0lab.<\/p>\n The next stop after Montreal was Swansea, Wales, where Carr spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher in the sleep lab of British research psychologist Mark Blagrove<\/a>. It was there that she began running her first polysomnography (sleep study) experiments using light and sound cues to induce lucid dreams. \u201cGetting people to give eye signals in response to our cues while they were sleeping was really exciting,\u201d she says. \u201cThat was fun.\u201d Blagrove also introduced her to dreamwork\u2014the practice of sharing dreams for both personal insight and empathy\u2014which Carr continues to study for its potential to enhance social connection.<\/p>\n It was while at Swansea that Carr\u2019s ambitions for dream engineering as a field\u2014not just a set of techniques scattered across different labs\u2014crystallized into something concrete. In January 2019, she organized and led the first Dream Engineering Workshop<\/a> at the MIT Media Lab, bringing together more than 50 scientists to brainstorm new technologies for studying, recording, and influencing dreams.<\/p>\n Later that fall, Carr returned to URochester\u2014and to Pigeon\u2019s lab\u2014this time as a postdoctoral associate supported by the Rochester Partnership for Research and Academic Career Training of Deaf Postdoctoral Scholars<\/a>. The fellowship enabled her to study sleep in Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals, drawing on her own experience with hearing loss and that of Rochester\u2019s large Deaf community. Around the same time, Carr was rising through the ranks of the IASD\u2014first as vice president, then as president beginning in 2021.<\/p>\n \u201cShe is, at first blush, not someone you would think of as especially outgoing\u2014and yet she has a very vast and nice network of folks that she\u2019s built over time,\u201d Pigeon says. \u201cSome people who may have been working relatively independently in their labs are now a community, talking about [dream engineering] and developing it as a subfield. And it was wild that before she was even a faculty member, she became president of an international organization. It\u2019s unheard of.\u201d<\/p>\n Carr now directs the Dream Engineering Lab\u2014DxE Lab<\/a>\u2014at the University of Montreal\u2019s Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine<\/a>, where she oversees six to eight graduate students and postdoctoral researchers working across several concurrent studies. The projects reflect Carr\u2019s wide-ranging interests, from lucid dreaming and the memory sources of dreams to a unique partnership with a film studies team exploring targeted dream incubation\u2014a technique in which subjects are shown a movie just prior to sleep, then hear clips of its soundtrack at different sleep stages.<\/p>\nEyes wide shut<\/h3>\n
![\"Michelle](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/michelle-carr-lucid-dream-engineer-new-scientist.jpg\")
Alternate realities<\/h3>\n
Into the lab<\/h3>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/review-spring-2026-michelle-carr-lucid-dream-engineer-sleep-study.jpg\")
Living the dream<\/h3>\n
![\"Michelle](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/michelle-carr-lucid-dream-engineer.jpg\")