Spirit Research

A study links virtual reality training to more frequent lucid dreams.

University of Trento researchers found that students who practiced meditation and virtual reality exercises reported lucid dreams more often than comparison groups, UA.NEWS reports. The training took place twice a week for a month.

A lucid dream is one in which the sleeper recognizes that they are dreaming, according to Live Science. The dreamer can sometimes influence what happens, although Wikipedia notes that control is not what defines a lucid dream.

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Surreal simulations prompted reality checks#

The students first meditated to focus on awareness of their thoughts, then entered virtual reality scenarios, UA.NEWS reports. Virtual reality uses a head-mounted display and tracking to create an immersive simulated environment, according to Wikipedia.

In the simulations, objects or people behaved in ways that defied physics, scenes shifted suddenly and branches blocked a door. UA.NEWS reports that these unusual details were intended to prompt reality checks, in which participants questioned whether what they saw was real.

According to UA.NEWS, participants maintained dream diaries and logged daily counts of recalled dreams and lucid dreams. SSBCrack reports that the researchers used the dreamlike settings to build on earlier approaches involving meditation and reality checks.

Comparison groups reported fewer lucid dreams#

The meditation and surreal-simulation group reported lucid dreams four times as often as a group that practiced reality checks alone, UA.NEWS reports. The surreal-simulation group reported lucid dreams at a rate more than eight times that of a separate group performing reality checks in realistic virtual settings.

The study authors said the comparison with realistic simulations indicated that virtual reality alone did not explain the result, according to UA.NEWS. The study appeared on September 28 in Frontiers in Psychology and involved 38 people.

The comparison groups did not meditate, so the study could not precisely separate meditation's contribution from that of the virtual scenarios, UA.NEWS reports. The researchers are conducting a follow-up study without meditation to examine whether the scenarios themselves are the key element.

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