Sleep, Dreaming, and Virtual Reality for Mental Health

Summary

People spend approximately one-third of their lives asleep, yet sleep is often underused as an opportunity to support psychological well-being. Contemplative traditions, including Tibetan Dream Yoga, have developed practices that use waking imagination and lucid dreaming to explore perception, awareness, and habitual patterns of thinking. Recent advances in sleep monitoring, dream communication, and lucid dream induction now make it possible to study these practices using scientific methods. This study is a randomized controlled trial designed to examine the feasibility and effects of a Dream-Yoga-inspired intervention compared with an active control condition. The intervention combines waking and dreaming practices that are adapted for individuals without prior experience and delivered using virtual reality-based training and home sleep technology. The program is designed to be scalable and culturally neutral, without requiring prior knowledge of contemplative or religious traditions. The primary goals of the study are to characterize sleep and waking neurophysiology associated with Dream-Yoga-inspired practices and to evaluate whether participation is associated with changes in sleep-related brain activity and cognitive processes. Outcomes include measures of lucid dreaming, sleep physiology, and waking cognitive and perceptual processes. Anxiety will be assessed as an exploratory outcome to examine whether participation may be associated with changes in emotional experience. This study is not designed to provide treatment for anxiety or other clinical conditions. Results from this study will help inform the development of scalable sleep-based mental training approaches and guide future research on the use of dreaming and sleep practices to support psychological health and well-being.

Eligibility

Inclusion Criteria:

* Individuals interested in participating will be screened for eligibility through a Qualtrics survey, a Score between 5-21 points in GAD-7.

Healthy, English-speaking adults (at least 18 years old) with high dream recall (at least 1/week).

Exclusion Criteria:

* We will exclude people who self-report any of the following:

  1. history of an established meditative practice
  2. psychological or psychiatric disorders (other than mild anxiety)
  3. sleep disorders, nightshift work in the past month, extreme chronotype or irregular sleeping pattern
  4. use of recreational drugs in the past month
  5. history of asthma, seizures or heart problems
  6. unwillingness to wear headband during sleep

Conditions1

Locations2 sites

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