Neuroscientists reveal method to train people to have lucid dreams — and it involves virtual reality and mediation

Lucid dreaming — in which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming and can sometimes influence the dream's trajectory — is a skill that can be honed, a new study finds. And the researchers found that doing this is surprisingly easy, after training participants to do exactly that using virtual reality (VR) twice a week for just one month.

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.

Before this study, published Sept. 28 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, neuroscientists tried to induce lucid dreaming with various methods. These included meditation exercises and so-called reality checks, in which participants ask themselves while awake whether unusual phenomena they encounter — such as people wearing odd Halloween costumes — are real or if they're dreaming. The idea is that they will ask themselves the same question in their sleep during bizarre dreams.

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.

Since dream-like scenarios are rare in waking life, the neuroscientists behind the new study used VR simulations of bizarre situations to complement reality-check exercises.

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.

After the training, participants went home and were asked to keep a dream diary that they wrote in every morning. They also filled out daily questionnaires, citing the number of dreams they recalled and how many they remembered being lucid.

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.

It was particularly surprising to find that such little training with the dream-like VR simulations was needed to develop lucid dreaming as a skill, said study co-author Nicola De Pisapia, a neuroscientist at the University of Trento. His team ran the experiment for only a month because any longer would have been too demanding for the participants, De Pisapia noted.

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.

"Virtual reality is the technology to fool you on stereoscopic vision and auditory information," he said. The term "stereoscopic" refers to techniques that create 3D illusions from 2D images by mimicking how human eyes see.

"It's basically the most immersive technology that we have at the moment," making it a good intervention for reality check exercises, Signorelli said.

The team also compared the number of lucid dreams participants reported against their total number of recalled dreams, which revealed an interesting pattern. On average, participants in each group recalled more dreams after starting the experiment than they did beforehand. However, the dream-simulating VR group recalled the fewest dreams overall after entering the experiment, even though they had the highest number of lucid dreams.

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.

The 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.

The team is now doing a follow-up study in which the meditation part has been removed, Signorelli said, to reveal whether the VR dream scenarios are the critical factor, as suspected.

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.

"Other future research could explore the potential therapeutic benefits of this intervention for people with nightmares, anxiety, or PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]," Morris suggested.

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