Neuroscientists at the University of Trento in Italy trained university students to have lucid dreams using a combination of meditation and virtual reality twice a week for one month. The results appeared Sept. 28 in Frontiers in Psychology.
Students first meditated to increase awareness of their thoughts, then performed "reality checks" in VR environments. During these sessions, they encountered bizarre scenarios like objects violating physics or rapid scene changes and asked themselves whether what they were experiencing was real or a dream. The goal was to train them to ask the same question while actually dreaming.
Participants who received this combined training reported lucid dreams four times more often than a control group that performed reality checks without meditation or VR. A second control group that performed reality checks in realistic VR environments was over eight times less likely to report lucid dreams, confirming that the dream-like quality of the VR was essential.
Study co-author Nicola De Pisapia noted it was surprising that such brief training produced results. Co-author Andrea Signorelli attributed the success to VR's immersive quality. "Virtual reality is the technology to fool you on stereoscopic vision and auditory information," he said, making it effective for reality-check practice.
One unexpected finding emerged: participants in the VR lucid-dream group recalled fewer dreams overall than control groups, despite having more lucid dreams. Signorelli speculated lucid dreaming may consume significant cognitive resources, reducing recall of other dreams. Daniel Morris, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University not involved in the study, suggested reporting bias might explain this pattern.
The study included only 38 participants. Neither control group meditated, so researchers cannot determine whether meditation or VR dream scenarios drove the results. Signorelli said a follow-up study is underway removing meditation to test whether VR alone is the critical factor.