Originally published on my Patreon, here’s a classic post for people who just bought / are hoping to get a new VR headset for the holidays like the Quest 3s here (affiliate link) and want to give lucid dreaming a try!
If you got a new Quest or other VR headset over the holidays (or just have more time to play with your current one), here’s a fairly wild thing you can do with it besides beating sabers or VR chatting: Train yourself to have lucid dreams in real life.
You know: The seriously cool kind of dreams where you experience yourself as being aware that you’re in a dream -- and are even able consciously change what’s happening within the dream.
Yes, you can train yourself to lucid dream over time without VR. One common technique is to get in the habit of keeping a notebook near your bed, and writing down your dreams the moment you wake up from one. (Which I’ve never tried, because frankly that seems like a pretty sure way to ruin a good night’s sleep.) So if you have a VR headset, you might be able to take a shortcut to all that.
These tips come from Dr. Jarrod Gott, who led an experiment testing that very thing a few years ago. I’ll get into the science down the way, but since it’s the holidays, here’s the fun part first. (As with anything in VR, be careful, and don’t do this near furniture or someone you can trip on.)
Play highly immersive content. Flying games are very good for this. IE, “Velocity“. Enough to produce a mild dissociative experience following play.
Then conduct reality intention checks within this 1-2 [second] dissociative window.
Here’s what Dr. Gott means by dissociative experience:
“[It’s] completely opposite to being present in the moment, in the flow state, having no conceptual awareness of how or why one got to their current situation.” So if you’re on a good first date, or enjoying a great movie, having good sex, or being “in the zone” while playing a sport -- that’s typically when you’re fully in the moment.
Dissociative, by contrast, explains Gott, is “[T]he constant intrusion of the inner narrative, the constant anxiety or thought process ‘am I enjoying this’, “‘is this what I want’, etc.”
In other words, experience an amazing VR game, and when you’re completely enjoying it… yank yourself out of it. (The sudden jolt of this going back to reality, says Gott, “feels a little like being on a low dose of Ketamine”.)
Then while you’re in that state, perform a reality check:
“Those are a common way to induce lucid dreaming,” Gott explains. “You ask yourself X number of times per day ‘am I in a dream?’ and seriously think about it. Sometimes you might look at your hand while doing so, or have a red card with ‘THIS IS NOT A DREAM’ written on it, which you carry around in your pocket.”
So do one of those things. Or perhaps, focus on a spinning top.
“The key to being lucid is therefore (and somewhat counterintuitively) finding the state of mind where one is ‘on a really bad date’,” Gott explains. “The inner monologue which normally ruins our experiences in waking life actually helps us to realize that the dream is, indeed, a dream after all. There are brain regions specifically responsible for creating this effect, and our brain kicks in during dreams to make the experience seamless.”
So try that process out, and report your findings back here. Now for the hard science of all this, which I originally blogged in 2020:
Fascinating study from researchers with the Donders Sleep & Memory Lab in the the Netherlands suggests that VR helps prime the user to have more lucid dreams... VR inherently cues a user to keep questioning whether the things they are experiencing while wearing a HUD and motion capture rig are real or not. And that constant Cartesian awareness, the researchers theorized, might bleed over into the VR user’s dreams.
To test this, they put volunteers into a VR rig and had them play a number of dream-like VR games. Then, they put the users in a realistic “normal” cafeteria setting in VR (pictured above)... but then made that simulation become increasingly strange and dreamlike:
Overall results were pretty promising, with the authors reporting that “VR training led to statistically significant increases in dream lucidity compared to the passive control group... [it’s] worth considering whether the VR experience itself could have exerted some dissociative effects, which prospectively provided a fertile and convincing (dream-like) psychological state from which to question one’s reality, as part of the required lucid dreaming training.”
In other words, the very fact of the experiment might have been the thing that helped prime the lucid dreaming. There are many more qualifications to the study’s results which you can read here, and they should be replicated by other researchers before jumping to any conclusions.
For a deeper dive, here’s more background from Gott, via a follow-up interview:
The goal was always to induce lucid dreaming, from the beginning. We initially thought that having people practice critical analysis within a ‘virtual dream’ might increase their ability to do the same in a real dream; but instead it seemed to be the opposite--the dreams reminded them so much of [that they were in VR], it brought them to lucidity. To us, this says that VR could potentially be such a powerful source in sensory input, it may enable certain types of learning that would be difficult to produce using traditional technologies and methods.
Our lab in part specializes in brain hacking. Once you understand the rules biologically (for example, about memory) you can use shortcuts to implant memories much more deeply, and much more powerfully, than through typical learning
“We tried to implant the idea ‘this may actually be a dream’ so deeply that it could wake somebody up into full consciousness (lucidity) inside of their dream; something which is very difficult to do, because these kinds of intelligent questions are biochemically blocked while dreaming.”
We hoped that getting people to question their own awareness in a virtual dream could bring out the same critical questioning in a real dream, and essentially override the biochemical block
The hack worked, but unexpectedly, in reverse. It seems that VR, for whatever reason, enables these learned memories to be implanted deeply enough to produce lucid dreams
We have two speculations about what the real mechanism was. Both seem to involve a rather unique cognitive state that VR has on people. In other words, yes, it was exactly as you summarized: it was the awareness of VR itself. The virtual dream, arguably, was not even necessary (we gave them many types of VR games).
We think there could be something work investigating looking into the gamer’s so-called “flow” state, and how training this could be a very viable way to conduct metacognition training across the spectrum
We are still looking into the “dissociation” angle. It was a bit of a wild card (were totally unprepared for and not expecting it as a reported effect) but will be promising to investigate in future studies
In other words, what started as a simple lucid dreaming induction study ended up considerably interested in hypnosis and other altered conscious states. Such is the way of scientific research.
I fell out of touch with Dr. Gott in recent years, but hope to follow up with him in 2026, to get the latest update on this research.
In any case, if you do try this, please consider sharing the result in Comments!