Just when you thought movies like Inception seemed too far fetched – Japanese scientists find a way to “read” peoples dreams.

Tokyo scientistists said on Friday that with the use of MRI scanners, they are now able to tap into the unconscious mind. Researchers say that this is the “the world’s first decoding” of night-time visions.

Yukiyasu Kamitani, a senior researcher and head of the study team said on Friday,

We have concluded that we successfully decoded some kinds of dreams with a distinctively high success rate,

The study went as follows – three people volunteered and were made to sleep in an MRI scanner. As they started to fall asleep they were woken up and asked what they were dreaming about.

They started to see a correlation between the patterns of brain activity and the images the people were seeing.

This process was repeated around 200 times, which was probably pretty annoying for the volunteers.

The results were then compared with the MRI maps to see if there was any correlation between the two.

Researchers were then able to predict what images the volunteers had seen with a 60 per cent accuracy rate, rising to more than 70 per cent with around 15 specific items including men, words and books, they said.

The scientists were careful to point out that their decoding process could only determine what people may have seen, visually, and did not have any reading into the emotion or context of the images.

Dreams have fascinated people since ancient times, but their function and meaning has remained closed,” Kamitani said. “I believe this result was a key step towards reading dreams more precisely.

[Sources: YouTube, News24, Financial Express]