Follow Us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter Lucid dreaming, in which the dreamer is aware that they are dreaming and can sometimes influence the trajectory of the dream, is a skill that can be honed, a new study finds. And 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 in the work. “Lucid dreaming may benefit people with nightmares by allowing them to transform their nightmares into positive dreams and feel greater agency in their dreams,” Morris told LiveScience in an email. Before this study, published September 28 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, neuroscientists attempted to induce lucid dreams 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 in strange Halloween costumes) are real or whether they are dreaming. The idea is that they ask themselves the same question while sleeping during strange dreams. Latest Videos from Live Science However, “for most people, our everyday lives may not seem like ‘a dream,'” Morris said, explaining why reality checks have had mixed results and don’t reliably trigger lucid dreams. Since dream scenarios are rare in waking life, the neuroscientists behind the new study used virtual reality simulations of strange situations to complement the reality check. exercises. You may like The team, based at the University of Trento in Italy, recruited university students and asked them to meditate and then perform the virtual reality training. The meditation aimed to increase students’ awareness of what they were thinking at any given moment. Whenever they encountered strange occurrences in the VR environment, such as objects or people violating the laws of physics or rapid changes from one scene to another, they performed reality checks. After the training, participants returned home and were asked to keep a dream journal that they wrote every morning. They also completed daily questionnaires, citing the number of dreams they remembered and how many they remembered being lucid. Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. Participants experienced lucid dreams four times more often than participants in a second group that performed reality checks without doing any meditation or virtual reality training. The study also included another comparison group, in which participants conducted reality checks during realistic rather than dreamlike virtual reality simulations; These participants were eight times less likely to have lucid dreams. This latter comparison ensured that the results were not caused solely by the use of virtual reality, the researchers said. When participants found something strange, such as branches covering a door, they actively wondered if it was real. (Image credit: Courtesy of the Italian Buddhist Union Research Center, CC BY license) It was particularly surprising to find that so little training with dream virtual reality 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 conducted the experiment for only a month because any longer would have been too taxing on the participants, De Pisapia said. Study co-author Andrea Signorelli, a doctoral student in De Pisapia’s lab, believes the virtual reality intervention is the reason the approach worked. People often don’t realize they are dreaming because dreams “deceive” the senses and seem realistic in the moment, he explained. What to read next “Virtual reality is the technology that tricks you with stereoscopic vision and auditory information,” he said. The term “stereoscopic” refers to techniques that create 3D illusions from 2D images by imitating how human eyes see. “It’s basically the most immersive technology we have right now,” making it a good intervention for reality-checking exercises, Signorelli said. The team also compared the number of lucid dreams participants reported to the total number of dreams recalled, which revealed an interesting pattern. On average, participants in each group remembered more dreams after starting the experiment than before. However, the VR group that simulated dreams recalled the fewest dreams overall after participating in the experiment, even though they had the most lucid dreams. Signorelli speculated that perhaps it takes a lot of energy to have lucid dreams, which could divert resources to remembering other dreams. Morris argued that, alternatively, participants in the lucid dreaming virtual reality group “may have been less motivated to report non-lucid dreams than the control groups.” Therefore, there may have been some bias in the report. The study had some limitations, such as the small sample size of 38 participants. Furthermore, neither of the two control groups were asked to meditate, so it is impossible to say whether the meditations or the virtual reality dream sessions had more influence on lucid dreaming in the test group. The team is now conducting a follow-up study in which the meditation portion was removed, Signorelli said, to reveal whether virtual reality dream scenarios are the critical factor, as suspected. Signorelli said he would like to see lucid dreaming training tailored to each individual. For example, virtual reality simulations could be customized to simulate a recurring nightmare experienced by a given person, training them to recognize specific triggers for that dream, he said. “Further research could explore the potential therapeutic benefits of this intervention for people with nightmares, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder. [post-traumatic stress disorder]” Morris suggested. This article is for informational purposes only and is not intended to provide medical advice. Signorelli, A., Tormen, F., Dal Bianco, B., and De Pisapia, N. (2026). Virtual reality as a metacognitive training tool for lucid dreaming. Frontiers in Psychology, 17 (1924370). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1924370 How much do you know about sleep and dreams? Find out with our sleep quiz!
