Berenika Maciejewicz
Background: During lucid dreaming, a person becomes aware of their own dreaming status. Some experienced lucid dreamers are able to further gain agency within the dream to consciously manipulate the dream's narrative, and characters, direct their own actions and dream’s plot. Neurologically, scientists attribute this phenomenon to the brain's parietal lobe activity. Dream lucidity occurrences are rare. To induce them, various cognitive techniques are currently being developed.
Methods: A novel protocol for inducing lucidity was designed by the author, implemented in this study, evaluated for effectiveness, and contrasted with two other induction techniques. Before starting their 10 days experiment, 33 female participants were divided into three equal groups for comparative testing. All completed a pre-study online survey, kept a dream recall diary and a sleep log for the duration of the research project, and filled out a final results survey.
Results: The study compared three methods based on reality testing protocols. The approach involved subjects undertaking reality check tests when awake during the day to help them build a cognitive resource of habitual differentiation to be used when asleep. The reasoning was based on the notion that repetitive daily testing set every two hours eventually becomes incorporated into a person's dream, enabling them to distinguish between sleep and wakefulness realities, which in turn induces dream lucidity. The findings showed that the new protocol performed significantly better than the other two methods. It might have achieved a better outcome due to the incorporation of one additional modality than the other tested methods. The correlation between dream recall abilities was assumed but not tested as a variable.
Conclusions: The research demonstrated the efficacy of the novel induction protocol over the other two investigated methods. Clinical applications of lucid dreaming may include developing new treatments for recurring nightmares, trauma, or for PTSD patients. Findings from dream consciousness research might prove therapeutically useful for neuroimaging techniques, anesthesia awareness, locked-in syndrome, and disorders of consciousness. Non-clinical applications in sports performance studies were also proposed. The development of more reliable and efficient lucidity induction methods might broaden our understanding of the phenomenon of emergence of self-awareness.