Researchers have successfully induced lucid dreams involving feelings of compassion and a sense of ego-loss in four participants. The feat was achieved by exposing the quartet to a specially designed virtual reality experience in the hours before bedtime, illustrating the potential of VR to influence subconscious processes and generate lasting psychological changes.
“By bridging the realms of virtual waking and dreaming states, this study opens new avenues for understanding how combining immersive technologies and sleep-engineering technologies might be leveraged for therapeutic and personal growth in waking life,” write the researchers in a new study.
To conduct their unique experiment, the team recruited four people who claimed to have regular lucid dreams, in which a sleeper becomes aware that they are dreaming and can often control elements of the dreamscape. Using virtual reality headsets, the participants were introduced to a program called Ripple, which aimed to generate feelings of awe, oneness and the loss of self – also known as ego-attenuation.
Previous studies have demonstrated that similar VR programs can trigger mystical experiences and ego-dissolution to the same extent as psychedelic drugs. In the case of Ripple, users saw themselves as a glowing sphere of light which then moved in synchrony with other people’s “energetic bodies”, before merging with them to produce a sense of oneness between participants and facilitators.
After an initial introduction to the experience, the volunteers were asked to return to the lab a week later for a second session, this time bringing their pyjamas. Three hours before going to bed, the VR headsets were fired up and participants re-entered the world of Ripple, before the researchers monitored their sleep using electroencephalography (EEG).
When brain activity readings indicated that the slumbering subjects had entered REM sleep, the researchers quietly played sounds from Ripple in an attempt to trigger lucid dreams resembling the VR. “Three participants experienced lucid dreams about Ripple that night, and all four reported dreams containing elements of Ripple,” they write.
Follow-up interviews then confirmed that the emotional and psychological effects of Ripple were recapitulated in these lucid dreams and even spilled over into waking life. For instance, the study authors explain that “Participant 4 reported a profound experience of interconnectedness and ego-dissolution,” while “participants 2 and 3 reported heightened waking sensory perception, such as touch and smell, for several days.”
Despite the small scale of the study, the researchers conclude that their results “underscore a way to expand VR’s benefits via VR-based dreaming.”
“This study opens the door for future research to now test the degree to which lucid dreaming combined with VR can benefit psychological well-being,” they write. “In particular, we envision many ways for dream content to synchronize with ego-attenuation and the perpetuation of awe in VR environments.”
The study has been published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness.
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