Provoking lucid dreams at home with sensory cues paired with pre-sleep cognitive training

Abstract

The ability to realize that you’re dreaming — lucid dreaming — has value for personal goals and for consciousness research. One route to lucid dreaming is to first undergo pre-sleep training with sensory cues and then receive those cues during REM sleep. This method, Targeted Lucidity Reactivation (TLR), does not demand extensive personal effort but generally requires concurrent polysomnography to guide cue delivery. Here we translated TLR from a laboratory procedure to a smartphone-based procedure without polysomnography. In a first experiment, participants reported increased lucid dreaming with TLR compared to during the prior week. In a second experiment, we showed increased lucidity with TLR compared to blinded control procedures on alternate nights. Cues during sleep were effective when they were the same sounds from pre-sleep training. Increased lucid dreaming can be ascribed to a strong link formed during training between the sounds and a mindset of carefully analyzing one’s current experience.