Transformative Benefits of Contemplative Sleep Practices and a Novel Pathway to Deliver Benefits to the General Public

Overview:

This project aims to characterize ways for individuals to learn how to use their dreaming experiences to expand their perceptual horizons in the waking state.

Abstract:

Although people spend a third of their lives asleep, they seldom recognize the tremendous opportunities for enhanced well-being that sleep offers. Contemplative dreaming with a set of intentional practices, as used for many centuries in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, provides an opportunity to deconstruct conventional reality and work through normal perceptual rigidity. In this project, we seek to understand how contemplative sleep practices can transform mental life. We are developing the methodology and technology to make such strategies widely accessible, combining wake contemplative training with novel uses of virtual reality and sleep engineering. Based on our prior work, we are also using interactive dreaming to allow for the real-time analysis of dream experiences and their neural correlates. Our new methods will provoke lucid dreams (which occur when a person recognizes that they are dreaming while still asleep) and can even be successful in people with no prior experience with lucid dreaming. We will attempt to increase lucid dreaming with these strategies using a wireless device for measuring EEG in the home. We will also develop a virtual-reality experience to attempt to enhance the impact of an intervention based on contemplative dreaming. Additionally, results from experts in contemplative dreaming will help us understand how wake-based and sleep-based practices are effectively combined. We hypothesize that these experts will be able to respond to prompts during lucid dreams in accordance with plans set before sleep. This project will thus produce knowledge about how advanced dreaming can help people radically adjust habitual tendencies to transcend the ordinary limits of perception. In our outreach phase, we will share our contemplative-dreaming intervention with the public. Understanding the potential benefits of contemplative dreaming will also support future research exploring a variety of methods for Perception Box expansion.

Broader Impact:

This project explores how ancient contemplative sleep practices (like lucid dreaming) can be harnessed to expand our thinking, improve emotional well-being, and reshape how we see the world, even while we sleep. By combining traditional insights with new technologies like virtual reality and home-based brain monitoring, researchers aim to create accessible tools that help people use their dream life for personal growth. If successful, this work could unlock a powerful and overlooked pathway to healing, clarity, and transformation during a part of life we often take for granted: sleep.