Lucid dreaming—the state of knowing that you are dreaming and sometimes being able to influence what happens—may be a trainable skill, according to a new study. Researchers found that university students who combined meditation with virtual-reality (VR) simulations of strange, dreamlike events reported four times as many lucid dreams as participants who practiced reality checks without meditation or VR training.
The findings could have practical applications, particularly for people who experience nightmares. Daniel Morris, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University who studies dreams and was not involved in the research, told Live Science by email that “lucid dreaming benefits people who have nightmares by turning them into positive dreams and allowing them to feel greater agency in their dreams.”
Training the mind to question reality
The study was published on September 28 in Frontiers in Psychology. Researchers have previously explored several methods for inducing lucid dreams, including meditation and so-called reality checks.
During a reality check, people ask themselves whether an unusual event is real or whether they are dreaming. The practice is based on the idea that repeatedly questioning strange experiences while awake may make people more likely to do the same thing during a dream. However, because daily life does not usually feel dreamlike, reality checks do not reliably trigger lucid dreams, Morris said.
To address that problem, researchers at the University of Trento in Italy used VR to simulate bizarre situations alongside meditation and reality-check exercises. The team recruited 38 university students. Participants first meditated to increase their awareness of their thoughts in the moment. They then used VR simulations in which objects or people violated the laws of physics, or in which one scene rapidly changed into another.
Whenever something strange occurred, participants asked themselves whether the experience was real or whether they were dreaming. After the training sessions, they returned home and recorded their dreams each morning. They also completed daily questionnaires reporting how many dreams they remembered and how many of those dreams had been lucid.
More lucid dreams after a month
Participants who completed the meditation and dreamlike-VR training reported four times more lucid dreams than those in a second group, which performed reality checks without meditation or VR training.
The study also included a comparison group that performed reality checks during a realistic VR simulation rather than a dreamlike one. These participants were more than eight times less likely to report lucid dreams than those who used the dreamlike VR simulation. According to the researchers, this comparison suggested that the results were not caused solely by using VR.
The researchers said they were surprised that such a short period of training appeared to produce the effect. Nicola de Pisapia, a neuroscientist at the University of Trento, said the experiment lasted only one month because extending it would have placed too much of a burden on the participants.
Why virtual reality may help
Study co-author Andrea Signorelli, a PhD student in de Pisapia’s lab, said the VR intervention may be central to the approach because people often fail to recognize that they are dreaming: Dreams “trick” the senses and feel real while they are happening.
“Virtual reality is a technology that deceives people with stereoscopic visual and auditory information,” Signorelli said. Stereoscopic vision creates the illusion of three-dimensional depth from two-dimensional images by mimicking the way the human eyes perceive the world.
Signorelli described VR as “basically the most immersive technology available to us at this time,” making it a potentially suitable tool for reality-check exercises.
The researchers also compared the number of lucid dreams with the total number of dreams participants remembered. On average, participants in every group recalled more dreams after the experiment began than they had before it. However, the group that used dream-simulating VR recalled the fewest dreams overall after entering the study, despite reporting the most lucid dreams.
Signorelli speculated that lucid dreaming might require substantial mental energy, potentially diverting resources from remembering other dreams. Morris suggested the opposite possibility: Participants in the lucid-dreaming VR group “may have been less willing to report non-lucid dreams than the control group.” This means the results may have been affected by reporting bias.
Study limitations and future research
The study had several limitations, including its small sample size of 38 participants. In addition, neither control group was asked to meditate, so the researchers could not determine whether meditation or the dreamlike VR sessions had the greater effect on lucid dreaming.
Signorelli said the team is conducting a follow-up study without the meditation component to determine whether the dreamlike VR scenario is as important as suspected.
He also said future lucid-dreaming training could be tailored to individuals. For example, VR simulations might be personalized to recreate a person’s recurring nightmares and teach them to recognize triggers specific to those dreams.
“Other future studies could investigate the potential therapeutic benefits of this intervention for people with nightmares, anxiety, or PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder],” Morris suggested.
Reference: Signorelli, A., Thomen, F., Dal Bianco, B., and de Pisapia, N. (2026). “Virtual reality as a metacognitive training tool for lucid dreaming.” Frontiers in Psychology 17(1924370).
This article is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice.
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Source: www.livescience.com