So by "brain image" it means they observed some activity in the brain related to actions performed in the dream. Pretty cool, but that title is seriously linkbait.
Not to mention that this general technique has been around for decades (developed at Stanford), and using an fMRI is the only novel part of this new study: http://www.lucidity.com/SleepAndCognition.html
What kind of lifehack would it be if we could fully understand lucid dreaming to the point we could teach everyone to do it on command. What would the benefits be for entertainment, education, and psychological health?
If you were getting your entertainment during sleep, what kind of productivity boost would that have? Spend more time sleeping and more of your waking hours working.
We'd never wake up I imagine. What'd be the point? I have heard true lucid dreaming described as being like the holodeck. Suddenly Nozick's Experience Machine becomes an alarming possibility which must be considered seriously. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_machine
This is more true than you realize. Many days I will awake from a lucid dream and go back to sleep for several more hours to discover/continue. "Waking up" from that is like being pulled out of an RPG game right in the middle of an exciting action sequence. Also, sometimes when I'm feeling bored or a little depressed, I'll go to sleep for the excitement/entertainment factor (it's a letdown if I don't end up in a lucid dream, but you can't always have everything in life :)
However, to say that we'd never wake up might be a bit of an exaggeration. Until all labor is automated in some way shape or form, eventually someones going to need to get up to keep the water running.
You also have to remember that people sort of have this tendency to die when they don't eat or drink. Though I guess thats one way we could all never wake up. Have a lucid dream thats so compelling that you can't justify it to yourself to get up for food and water.
EDIT: On the other hand, you could feed people intravenously. But a matrix of solipsism probably doesn't sit right with a significant portion of humanity.
Happens for me too :) .. Some days I seed what I want to dream about before sleeping (usually by watching a related genre movie).. I can go back to the same dream if interrupted for a few minutes (5-10).. not hours though... Once in the dream and after realizing that it is a dream - I can control most of the things (environment, flying, running on four legs etc) - though I keep moving in/out of that realization...sort of like inception... :)
Be wary of trying to further "lucidate" the lucid dream into another lucid state. I've woken up going a few tiers into such very dissasociative from reality for several (4+ hours) over weekends :) EG: building in my dream a "jump pad" standing upon such, to "jump" to an even deeper reality, etc.
It sounds wonky, but, throwing it out there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_disorder
Subset: Depersonalization disorder: periods of detachment from self or surrounding which may be experienced as "unreal" (lacking in control of or "outside of" self) while retaining awareness that this is only a feeling and not a reality.
A big part in training to have lucid dreams is just plain suggestion, so maybe just having a constant culture-wide preoccupation with lucid dreams would make people pay more attention to their dreams and have more lucid dreams.
Too bad hearing about other peoples' lucid dreams is about as boring as hearing about other peoples' dreams in general, so there it's a bit tricky how you'd set up the culture around it.
One idea might be what traditional shamanistic cultures do, and pretend that dreams actually take place in a "real" astral plane, instead of just being whatever your head comes up with. As per the suggestion thing, this might make people end up imagining their lucid dream adventures into the culturally shared astral plane imagery instead of stuff that's more transparently just a rehash of their daily stuff, and strengthen the lucid dream inducing cultural narrative.
For a completely different approach, I wonder if it were possible to build some kind of transcranial magnetic stimulation device that increased dream recall and lucid dreams drastically.
If you compare it to the number of dreams people have around the world each night, it probably is rare. But then, it's not that difficult to learn and you also find quite a lot of people whose dreams are usually lucid without really being aware of the difference.
There was an interesting talk at the wesolveforx conference dealing with imaging the mind's eye (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbSEjOJL3U). These researchers are having their subjects watch hundreds of hours of youtube videos and recording their brain activity. They would then show them another brand new video while again observing their brain activity and pull up and juxtapose videos that the subject has seen previously and that activated the same parts of the brain as the new video. The similarity between the two video feeds is astounding. I wonder if a similar technique could be used for imaging dreams.
Similar studies have been conducted by LaBerge and others for decades now. I did a brief search and found two examples: One that measured EEG for clenching hands (in 1986!) and one that measured cardio-vascular activity for performing squats. So the novelty here is probably the use of fMRI. This is probably difficult because sleeping in these things is not exactly comfortable.
