Using Virtual Reality Seems to Enhance Dreamtime Reality

Fascinating story from The Atlantic:

Could regular forays into virtual reality actually trigger lucid dreams, too? A survey Gackenbach conducted in conjunction with her study finds a correlation between heavy Rift usage and increased dream lucidity. Participants, including both Rift developers and gamers, described having increasingly lucid dreams as they spent more time immersed in virtual reality. “I seem more in control of my dreams now and am somewhat aware that it is a dream,” one technical writer reported.

This makes intuitive sense to me, since many VR experiences, like Tilt Brush, already feel like lucid dreaming. If this phenomenon scales to the wider population, it may turn out to be one of the most interesting and worthwhile use cases for VR:

After all, we spend roughly one-third of our lives in dreamtime consciousness, and most of us do not only not have any control over that experience, but often, it's disturbing or confusing. From what we know, it takes weeks and weeks of practice to lucidly dream -- keeping a daily dream journal, consistently jotting down dreams when you wake up, etc. -- so a technology that's relatively easy and fun to use which enhances that training could be a massive benefit to helping us explore this undiscovered country of the mind.

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Comments

[metacam oh]

been playing a lot of No Man's Sky lately and have been jetpacking in my dreams

[JohnC]

Now that would be something, VR opening up the original Virtual world to conscious exploration. But from my own experience many years back in the murky world of the occult there are those who find lucid dreaming easy and others who spend a lifetime getting nowhere. So maybe it is just firing up those who have the potential but just never had the spark. For me it was a kind of reverse of this. I got in to computers when I realized that I did not have to sweat blood to get out of my body into a dream world of my own creation,and contact millions of other minds directly and easily without the need for impossible ancient techniques for developing telepathy.