There is a question that we rarely ask ourselves while we dream: what if this wasn’t real? In the middle of a conversation with someone who has already died, while we walk through a wall or see how the landscape changes without explanation, our brain usually accepts these scenes as if they were perfectly normal. But some people manage to interrupt that illusion. They realize that they are asleep and that what is happening around them is a dream. This experience is known as lucid dreaming and, according to a new study, it may be possible to train the mind to recognize it. with the help of meditation and virtual reality.
The study, published in Frontiers in Psychologyproposes a strategy that combines three elements: keep a dream journal, perform reality checks during the day, and practice in virtual environments that replicate some of the quirkiness of dreams. The idea is that, by getting used to questioning strange situations while awake, people can repeat that gesture during sleep and discover that they are dreaming.
To put it to the test, a team from the University of Trento in Italy recruited 38 volunteers with little prior experience in lucid dreaming. He divided them into three groups and followed their development for five weeks. They all received the same basic instructions: write down the dreams they remembered every morning and perform about ten reality checks a day. They even set alarms on their phones, set to ring every hour between nine in the morning and nine at night, as a reminder to ask themselves if they were awake or dreaming.
The difference came with virtual reality. One group, consisting of 13 participants, completed eight sessions over four weeks. Each meeting began with about 15 minutes of open monitoring meditation.a practice that consists of observing sensations, thoughts and emotions without concentrating exclusively on an object or reacting immediately to what appears. Then, for about 20 minutes, volunteers put on a virtual reality headset and walked through scenarios designed to reproduce disconcerting events: objects out of place, sudden changes in scenery, elements that changed when they looked away, or situations that defied physical laws.
Every time they found something strange they had to stop and do a reality check. They could watch their hands, examine details in the environment, or try to pass through an object. In the last sessions, the training progressed towards actions typical of lucid dreams, such as jumping to great heights, flying or modifying the size of one’s own body through a verbal intention. The goal was to practice not only recognizing an anomaly, but also the ability to maintain lucidity and act deliberately within that scenario. The other two groups allowed us to check whether the result was simply due to wearing a headset. Twelve participants performed the same reality checks and used virtual reality for eight sessions, but in this case they explored conventional environments and searched for hidden baseballs. The remaining 13 followed only the usual training, without virtual reality or meditation sessions.
The results showed a striking difference. The group that practiced with scenarios designed to resemble dreams reported 26 lucid-similar experiences, compared to 11 in the group that only underwent basic training and four in the group exposed to conventional virtual reality. When the authors calculated the frequency of these experiences in relation to the total number of dreams remembered, They estimated that it was four times higher in the experimental group than in the group without virtual reality and 8.6 times higher than in the conventional virtual reality group. They also observed that 84.6% of the participants in the experimental group reported at least one lucid or semi-lucid dream during the study. The proportion was 61.5% in the group that only practiced reality checks and 33.3% among those who used conventional virtual reality.
The proposed explanation has to do with metacognition, that is, the ability to observe and evaluate one’s own mental processes. In everyday life, impossible situations are rare. On the other hand, dreams are full of changes of scenery, objects that behave absurdly, and events that do not fit with logic. By reproducing these anomalies in a virtual environment, participants could rehearse a reaction that would then, According to the team’s hypothesis, it would carry over to sleep: stop, question what is happening and check if they are awake.
However, the study does not allow us to know which part of the training was decisive. Because meditation and the specific virtual reality were administered together, it is not possible to determine whether one of them had more weight than the other. Nor was it proven that meditation alone increased lucid dreaming. The authors are preparing a new experiment in which they will eliminate this component to study the role of virtual reality. There is another important limitation: the sample was small and the results were based on the participants’ accounts, not on an objective verification of their dreams during REM sleep. Additionally, the researchers grouped fully lucid and semi-lucid experiences into the same category to analyze the results.
The possibility of adapting these simulations to recurring nightmares opens a future line of research. If a person learns to recognize the strange elements in their own dreams, they may be able to acquire greater ability to intervene in them. But its usefulness in treating nightmares, anxiety or post-traumatic stress has not yet been proven. For now, the conclusion is more modest, but at the same time fascinating: Perhaps to discover that we are dreaming we do not need to learn to sleep differently, but rather train ourselves to question what we see.