The study's results could have practical benefits, said Daniel Morris, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University who studies dreams and was not involved with the work. "Lucid dreaming can benefit people with nightmares by allowing them to transform their nightmares into positive dreams and feel greater agency in their dreams," Morris told Live Science in an email.
However, "for most people, our day-to-day lives may not feel 'dream-like,'" Morris said, explaining why reality checks have had mixed results and don't reliably trigger lucid dreaming.
The team, based at the University of Trento in Italy, recruited university students and asked them to meditate and then perform the VR training. The meditation was intended to increase students' awareness of what they were thinking about in a given moment. Each time they encountered bizarre happenings in the VR environment, such as objects or people violating laws of physics or rapid switches from one scene to another, they performed reality checks.
The participants experienced lucid dreams four times more often than participants did in a second group that did reality checks without performing any meditation or VR training. The study also included another comparison group, in which participants carried out reality checks during realistic rather than dream-like VR simulations; these participants were over eight times less likely to report lucid dreams. This latter comparison ensured that the results were not caused solely by the use of VR, the researchers said.
When participants encountered something strange, like branches covering a door, they actively asked themselves whether it was real. (Image credit: Courtesy of the Italian Buddhist Union Research Center, CC BY license)Study co-author Andrea Signorelli, a doctoral student in De Pisapia's lab, thinks the VR intervention is at the heart of why the approach worked. People often don't realize that they're dreaming because the dreams "fool" your senses and feel realistic in the moment, he explained.
"It's basically the most immersive technology that we have at the moment," making it a good intervention for reality check exercises, Signorelli said.
Signorelli speculated that perhaps it takes a lot of energy to have lucid dreams, which could divert resources away from recalling other dreams. Morris argued that, alternatively, participants in the lucid-dream VR group "may have been less motivated to report non-lucid dreams than the control groups." So there may have been some bias in the reporting.
Related storiesThe study had some limitations, such as its small sample size of 38 participants. Plus, neither of the two control groups were asked to meditate, so it is impossible to say whether the meditations or the dreamlike VR sessions had more influence over lucid dreaming in the test group.
Signorelli said that he would like to see lucid-dream training tailored for each individual. For example, the VR simulations could be personalized to simulate a recurrent nightmare that a given person experiences, training them to recognize triggers specific to that dream, he said.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
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