In Trento, the VR and meditation group reported lucid dreams four times more often
UA.NEWS30
October
2026
19:41
Researchers at the University of Trento in Italy tested a lucid-dream training program involving meditation, reality checks and virtual-reality scenarios. Participants who performed these exercises twice a week for a month reported lucid dreams four times more often than a group that only practiced reality checks, Live Science reports.
How the training took place
A lucid dream is a dream in which a person realizes they are asleep and can sometimes influence the course of the dream. University students were recruited for the experiment. First, they meditated to enhance awareness of their own thoughts at a given moment, and then underwent VR training.
In the virtual environment, participants saw dream-like situations: objects or people violated the laws of physics, scenes changed abruptly, and unusual details, such as branches blocking a door, were meant to prompt them to ask themselves whether what they saw was real. During the study, participants kept a dream diary and recorded daily how many dreams they remembered and how many of them were lucid.
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Comparison with other groups
Another group performed reality checks during realistic rather than dream-like VR scenarios. Its participants reported lucid dreams more than eight times less often than the group with surreal simulations. According to the authors, this indicates that the result cannot be explained by the use of virtual reality alone.
The study, published on September 28 in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, involved 38 people. The control groups did not meditate, so it is currently impossible to precisely separate the effect of meditation from that of the VR scenarios. The team is conducting a follow-up study without meditation to determine whether the virtual scenarios themselves are the key element of the method.
Possible applications
Neuroscientist Daniel Morris of Northwestern University, who was not involved in the work, suggested that lucid dreaming could potentially be useful for people with nightmares, as it makes it possible to change their plot. The study authors are also considering personalizing VR training, for example by recreating recurring nightmares so that a person can learn to recognize their characteristic signals.
