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.

Conditions

• Anxiety

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Dream Yoga Inspired Intervention

This customized contemplative training will guide participants in exploring techniques used in Tibetan Dream Yoga. Strategies in Tibetan manuals are thus transferred to a modern context and adapted as a group intervention. Goals will be set for dreaming that include gaining lucidity, a degree of volitional influence over the dream. Participants will be instructed on how to work with their dream-world self-concept, which can include changing the environment deliberately, making other individuals appear, and switching identities with other individuals in the dream. Wearable devices will be used to present cues during sleep both to provoke lucidity and to remind individuals of Dream-Yoga exercises to be engaged during sleep. The intervention includes both wake- and sleep-based instructions, with instructions on learning to apply the new orientation in their daily lives.

BEHAVIORAL

Sleep Health Enhancement Program (SHEP)

The control group will receive a modified version of the Health Enhancement Program (HEP), which was developed as an active control condition for mindfulness-based interventions, with a particular focus on sleep hygiene and dream journaling. It controls for several non-specific factors such as expectations of positive change, group support, behavioural activation, facilitator attention, at-home practice, treatment duration, and format (MacCoon et al., 2012; Rosenkranz et al., 2013). Our modified HEP will be structurally equivalent to the Dream-Yoga condition, with high similarity on non-program-specific factors, including timing and number of sessions. The two VR sessions will focus on relaxation. Participants will be taught positive health-enhancing practices, such as healthy diet and gentle exercise, with activity-based sessions covering exercise, sleep, dreaming, stress, anxiety, nutrition, journaling, music enjoyment, and drawing.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• University of Virginia

  collaborator OTHER

• Northwestern University

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

DOUBLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2026-01-15

Primary Completion

2026-10-31

Completion

2027-12-31

Countries

• United States

Study Locations