Scientists Found a Way to Train People to Realize They're Dreaming—And It Starts While They're Awake
Imagine finding yourself in a familiar city.
You walk down a street you recognize. The buildings look ordinary, people pass by, and everything feels completely real.
Then something impossible happens.
A car floats silently into the sky.
The pavement bends upward like a wave.
A doorway opens into a room that should not exist.
Instead of accepting these strange events, you stop and ask yourself a question:
Am I dreaming?
And suddenly, you realize the answer is yes.
You are asleep.
Your body is resting somewhere in the real world.
But inside the dream, you are conscious of what is happening.
This extraordinary experience is called lucid dreaming.
For centuries, lucid dreams have fascinated philosophers, spiritual traditions, psychologists, and people curious about the mysteries of human consciousness.
Some dreamers report being able to change their surroundings, fly, confront nightmares, or deliberately explore imaginary environments.
Others simply become aware that they are dreaming without gaining much control over what happens next.
For most people, however, lucid dreams are relatively rare and unpredictable.
But what if the ability to recognize a dream could be trained?
What if the key was not something you did while sleeping, but a habit you developed during the day?
A study published on September 28, 2026, in the journal Frontiers in Psychology suggests that a combination of meditation, reality checks, and carefully designed virtual reality experiences might help.
Researchers at the University of Trento in Italy recruited 38 participants and tested whether rehearsing the recognition of impossible events while awake would increase awareness during dreams.
Their results were striking.
Over five weeks, participants receiving the specialized training reported 26 lucid or semi-lucid dreams, compared with 11 in the standard-training group and four in the group using unrelated virtual reality experiences.
The researchers did not demonstrate a guaranteed way to control dreams. Nor could they determine whether meditation, virtual reality, or their combination was chiefly responsible.
But the findings suggest something intriguing about consciousness:
Perhaps learning to question reality while awake makes it easier to recognize when reality has become a dream.
What Exactly Is Lucid Dreaming?
A lucid dream is a dream in which the sleeper becomes aware that they are dreaming.
That awareness is its defining feature.
It does not necessarily mean the dreamer can control everything.
Someone might recognize that they are dreaming while still being unable to change the story.
Another might deliberately choose where to go, what to do, or how to respond to a frightening situation.
Both experiences can involve lucidity.
The Strange State Between Dreaming and Self-Awareness
Ordinary dreaming often involves accepting events that would be impossible in waking life.
People might encounter a deceased relative, travel instantaneously between countries, or discover that their childhood home has transformed into an unfamiliar building.
Despite the contradictions, the dream usually feels convincing.
During lucid dreaming, something changes.
The person becomes capable of reflecting on the experience itself.
Instead of simply participating in the dream, they recognize their own state of consciousness.
Scientists associate this capacity with metacognition—the ability to monitor and think about one's own mental processes.
Lucid dreams most commonly occur during rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, a stage strongly associated with vivid dreaming.
The new study investigated whether metacognitive habits developed during waking life could carry over into REM dreams.
Why the University of Trento Researchers Used Virtual Reality
The study was conducted by Andrea Signorelli, Francesco Tormen, Bruna Dal Bianco, and Nicola De Pisapia.
Their hypothesis was relatively straightforward.
People often fail to recognize dreams because they accept bizarre experiences without questioning them.
But if someone regularly practices noticing impossible situations and examining whether they are dreaming, perhaps that habit can transfer into sleep.
Traditional lucid-dreaming exercises already use this idea.
They encourage people to perform reality checks during the day.
For example, a person might pause, examine their surroundings, and ask whether they are dreaming.
The difficulty is that ordinary waking life rarely contains the kinds of impossible events frequently experienced during dreams.
That is where virtual reality offers something unusual.
A VR environment can make a person feel immersed in a world where the laws of physics no longer behave as expected.
Objects can float.
Rooms can change.
Familiar environments can transform into impossible spaces.
The experience is simulated, but the participant's perceptual system still has to respond to the unusual events.
The researchers wanted to know whether that combination of immersion and deliberate questioning would help people become more aware of dreamlike inconsistencies.
How the Five-Week Experiment Worked
The researchers assigned 38 adults with little previous lucid-dreaming experience to three groups.
All participants followed a basic training routine involving daily reality checks, dream diaries, and questionnaires about their dream experiences.
The difference was the type of additional training they received.
13
People
Group 1: Specialized VR and meditation
Participants completed the normal reality-check routine plus eight training sessions. Each specialized session included approximately 15 minutes of open-monitoring meditation followed by around 20 minutes of dream-oriented VR training.
12
People
Group 2: Ordinary virtual reality
Participants followed the same standard dream exercises and completed eight VR sessions involving an unrelated activity: exploring an environment and searching for hidden baseballs. They did not receive the meditation component.
13
People
Group 3: Traditional reality checks only
Participants maintained dream diaries, practiced daily reality checks, and completed the questionnaires, without VR sessions or the specialized meditation training.
The VR sessions took place twice weekly during the first four weeks.
During the fifth week, all participants continued the baseline exercises and recording their dreams, but no additional VR sessions were conducted.
The study therefore tested approximately one month of specialized training across a five-week observation period.
The Results: 26 Lucid-Like Dreams Versus 11 and Four
REPORTED LUCID OR SEMI-LUCID DREAMS
Lucid-like dreams recorded over five weeks
Total self-reported episodes per group, not individual participants or guaranteed success rates.
07142128VR + meditationReality checksUnrelated VRSource: Signorelli et al., Frontiers in Psychology, September 2026. frontiersin.org
The specialized group reported the greatest number of lucid-like dreams.
But the most important findings involved more than the raw totals.
Researchers also calculated the proportion of participants in each group who reported at least one lucid or semi-lucid dream.
PARTICIPANTS REPORTING AT LEAST ONE LUCID-LIKE DREAM
These percentages correspond to 11 of 13, 8 of 13, and 4 of 12 participants respectively. They are study observations, not predicted success rates for the general public. frontiersin.org
The authors also used a statistical model that took the total number of recalled dreams into account.
In that analysis, the lucid-like dream rate in the specialized VR group was estimated at four times that of the reality-check-only group and 8.6 times that of the unrelated-VR group.
These findings were statistically significant in the reported analysis.
But the estimates came from a small sample, so they should not be interpreted as guaranteed benefits for everyone who tries the technique.
An equally important observation was that simply spending time in virtual reality was not enough.
The group using ordinary VR reported fewer lucid-like dreams than the group practicing reality checks alone.
That suggests the content and purpose of the exercise may matter more than the presence of a headset.
Why Impossible Experiences Might Train the Dreaming Brain
The central idea behind the research is that dreams and virtual reality share a peculiar characteristic.
Both can create convincing experiences that do not obey the rules of everyday reality.
In a dream, a person may find themselves walking through a childhood home that somehow contains rooms from a completely different building.
They may encounter people who suddenly change appearance.
They may attempt to read a sign, only to discover that the words keep changing.
Yet the dreaming mind often accepts these contradictions without questioning them.
Why?
One possible explanation involves changes in the brain processes responsible for self-monitoring and critical evaluation during sleep.
The Brain's Reality-Checking System
During ordinary waking life, people continuously compare what they perceive with their understanding of the world.
If a person sees a chair floating unsupported in the middle of a room, they will probably question what they are seeing.
Perhaps it is an illusion.
Perhaps there is a hidden support.
Or perhaps they are looking at a computer-generated scene.
During dreaming, that same critical questioning often becomes less effective.
The dreamer simply accepts the floating chair as part of the experience.
Lucid dreaming involves a partial return of that reflective awareness.
The person recognizes something unusual and correctly identifies the experience as a dream.
The University of Trento researchers reasoned that this type of awareness might be trainable.
If a person repeatedly encounters impossible events in VR and practices questioning their surroundings, that mental habit might become more likely to appear during sleep.
Metacognition: Thinking About Your Own Thinking
The scientific concept behind this approach is metacognition.
It refers to the ability to monitor and evaluate one's own mental activity.
For example, recognizing that you are confused, noticing that your attention has wandered, or questioning whether a perception is reliable all involve metacognitive processes.
Lucid dreaming requires a particularly unusual form of metacognition.
The dreamer must recognize that their current conscious experience is happening within a dream.
The researchers designed their intervention to strengthen this kind of self-monitoring during waking life.
The hope was that the habit would eventually transfer into dreams.
Why Meditation Was Included
Virtual reality was only one part of the experimental training.
The specialized group also practiced approximately 15 minutes of open-monitoring meditation before each VR session.
This form of meditation encourages awareness of thoughts, sensations, and experiences without becoming overly absorbed in them.
Rather than concentrating exclusively on a single object, participants practice noticing what arises in consciousness.
The Connection Between Mindfulness and Lucidity
Consider a person experiencing an ordinary dream.
They might see something bizarre, become frightened, and immediately react.
The experience unfolds automatically.
But someone who has developed the habit of noticing their own thoughts may be more likely to pause and question the experience.
That is the proposed connection.
Meditation could encourage a reflective mental state, while VR provides situations in which that reflection can be practiced.
The training attempts to combine two abilities:
Noticing an experience and questioning whether it makes sense.
However, the study did not include a group that practiced meditation without dream-oriented VR.
Therefore, the researchers could not determine how much of the observed improvement came from meditation, how much came from VR, or whether their combination was especially important.
That remains one of the central unanswered questions.
Why Ordinary Virtual Reality Wasn't Enough
One of the most interesting findings was that the control group using unrelated VR reported the fewest lucid-like dreams.
Those participants still experienced immersive simulated environments.
They still wore headsets.
They still interacted with objects inside a virtual world.
But they did not practice the same dream-oriented recognition exercises.
Their VR activity involved searching for hidden baseballs rather than deliberately confronting impossible events and questioning reality.
This suggests an important distinction.
Immersion alone may not be the useful ingredient.
The training may work by teaching a specific mental response to unusual experiences.
The researchers were not simply exposing participants to imaginary worlds.
They were encouraging participants to develop a habit of recognizing when an experience violated expectations.
And that habit may be relevant to becoming lucid during sleep.
Still, the lower result in the ordinary-VR group should not be interpreted as proof that conventional VR suppresses lucid dreaming. The sample was too small to support such a broad conclusion.
Can Scientists Really Verify a Lucid Dream?
This is where the research becomes particularly fascinating.
Unlike ordinary waking experiences, dreams cannot be directly observed in their entirety by another person.
Researchers frequently rely on dream reports collected after awakening.
But there are also laboratory methods for investigating lucid dreaming.
During REM sleep, people experience characteristic eye movements.
In some laboratory studies, trained lucid dreamers have been able to communicate that they are aware of dreaming through predetermined eye-movement signals.
Researchers can record these movements alongside physiological measurements of sleep.
This provides a way to verify certain lucid-dream experiences experimentally.
Earlier research on VR-assisted lucid-dream training, published in 2020, included laboratory evidence of lucid dreams verified through eye-movement signals during polysomnography.
What the 2026 Study Actually Measured
The new University of Trento study relied on participants' daily dream questionnaires and self-reported experiences.
The researchers classified dreams into categories that included ordinary, semi-lucid, and lucid dreams.
For their main analysis, they combined semi-lucid and fully lucid experiences into a broader category called lucid-like dreams.
This detail matters.
The reported total of 26 does not necessarily represent 26 fully lucid dreams independently verified through sleep-laboratory recordings.
It represents 26 reported experiences meeting the study's classification criteria.
The findings are meaningful, but they are not equivalent to objective verification of every dream.
Could Lucid Dreaming Help People With Nightmares?
One of the potential applications of lucid-dreaming research concerns recurrent nightmares.
Nightmares can involve frightening experiences that feel real while they are happening.
For some people, recurring nightmares become distressing enough to interfere with sleep and everyday wellbeing.
The possibility of recognizing a nightmare while it is happening could offer a different way of responding.
Instead of feeling entirely trapped within the dream, a person might realize that the experience is not occurring in waking reality.
Some dreamers report being able to alter frightening dream scenarios after becoming lucid.
Imrul
From Fear to Awareness
Imagine dreaming that you are being pursued through a dark building.
Normally, the dream might continue until you wake up frightened.
But if you become lucid, you might recognize that the pursuer and the building are elements of a dream.
That recognition could reduce the sense of immediate threat.
Some people may even be able to change the dream's direction.
Researchers are interested in whether such experiences could eventually complement therapies for recurring nightmares.
However, the 2026 study did not test lucid-dream training as a treatment for nightmares, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder.
Those applications remain possibilities for future research, not demonstrated clinical benefits of this particular intervention.
Can Anyone Learn to Lucid Dream?
The study offers encouraging evidence that some people can increase their reported lucid-dream experiences through training.
But it does not prove that everyone can learn the skill in the same way.
Individual differences may matter.
Some people naturally remember dreams more frequently.
Others experience lucid dreams spontaneously.
Sleep habits, expectations, attention, and dream recall may all influence how often someone reports becoming aware during dreams.
The study also involved a specific group of participants.
They were young adults, with an average age of approximately 23, who had little previous lucid-dream training.
People outside that population may respond differently.
A Simple Reality-Checking Exercise
For readers interested in the psychological principle, a basic reality check involves deliberately pausing during the day and examining one's surroundings.
For example, you might ask yourself whether you can clearly remember how you arrived at your current location.
You could also consider whether anything around you is inconsistent with ordinary reality.
The purpose is not to convince yourself that waking life is unreal.
It is to develop a thoughtful habit of noticing details and evaluating experiences.
A dream journal can also help people remember their dreams.
However, the specialized VR-and-meditation intervention tested in this study was a structured laboratory program. There is no evidence that casually using a VR headset will produce equivalent results.
Anyone trying dream-awareness exercises should preserve normal sleep schedules rather than repeatedly interrupting sleep in pursuit of lucid dreams.
The Risks and Limitations of Lucid-Dream Training
Lucid dreaming is often presented online as an exciting form of nighttime adventure.
But attempts to induce it should not come at the expense of healthy sleep.
Some popular techniques involve deliberately waking during the night or repeatedly interrupting sleep cycles.
Sleep disruption can contribute to fatigue, poor concentration, and other difficulties.
People who experience frequent nightmares, distressing sleep paralysis, severe sleep disturbance, or difficulty distinguishing dreamlike experiences from waking reality may particularly benefit from discussing such practices with a qualified clinician.
The VR-based research also should not be interpreted as a universally safe or established therapy.
The experiment excluded people with diagnosed neurological or psychiatric conditions, so its results cannot automatically be generalized to those groups.
What the New Study Cannot Tell Us
Research question | Current answer |
|---|---|
Can specialized training increase reported lucid-like dreams? | Encouraging evidence from this small study |
Does ordinary VR produce the same benefit? | Not in this experiment |
Is meditation essential? | Unknown |
Are the improvements sustained for months or years? | Not established |
Were all dreams independently verified in a sleep lab? | No |
Can this approach treat recurrent nightmares? | Not demonstrated here |
Will it work equally well for all age groups? | Unknown |
These uncertainties do not invalidate the findings.
They establish the questions that larger, better-controlled experiments need to answer.
What Makes This Discovery Important for Neuroscience?
The study reaches beyond the curiosity of being able to recognize a dream.
It raises a broader scientific question about the relationship between learning and consciousness.
We usually associate learning with acquiring information or physical skills.
A musician learns an instrument.
An athlete develops coordination.
A student learns a language.
But what if a person can also train certain habits of awareness?
The University of Trento researchers are exploring whether a pattern of reflective attention learned during waking life can influence conscious experiences during sleep.
If that connection can be demonstrated reliably, it could provide valuable information about how metacognitive processes operate across different states of consciousness.
Virtual Reality as a Laboratory for Impossible Experiences
VR offers researchers something that ordinary life cannot easily provide.
They can create controlled, repeatable experiences that violate everyday expectations.
A participant can encounter a floating object, observe an impossible transformation, and practice responding with deliberate reflection.
The same conditions can be presented to multiple participants.
This makes VR a useful experimental environment for studying how people detect anomalies, direct attention, and question their perceptions.
The 2026 paper suggests that such training could extend beyond the laboratory and influence dreams.
But the precise neurological mechanisms remain uncertain.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a lucid dream?
A lucid dream is a dream in which the person becomes aware that they are dreaming. Some people can influence the dream's events, but control is not required for a dream to be lucid.
Can virtual reality help people have lucid dreams?
A September 2026 study found that participants receiving specialized dream-oriented VR training combined with meditation reported more lucid-like dreams than comparison groups. Larger studies are needed to confirm the effect.
How long did the lucid-dreaming training last?
The intervention included eight specialized VR sessions over four weeks, followed by a fifth week of continued dream recording and reality checks without additional VR training.
How many people participated in the study?
The experiment included 38 adults, divided into groups of 13, 12, and 13 participants.
Did the VR group really have 26 lucid dreams?
The specialized group reported 26 lucid or semi-lucid dreams across the study. These were self-reported lucid-like experiences, not 26 individually verified full-lucidity episodes.
Does meditation cause lucid dreams?
Meditation may support reflective awareness, but this study cannot establish whether meditation alone caused the observed increase because it was combined with specialized VR training.
Can lucid dreaming cure nightmares?
There is interest in lucid-dreaming techniques as potential approaches to recurring nightmares, but this particular study did not establish a treatment benefit or demonstrate a cure.
The Most Extraordinary Discovery May Be That Awareness Can Be Practiced
Dreams have always occupied a strange place in human experience.
They can feel completely real while contradicting almost everything we know about reality.
We accept impossible events.
We travel through imaginary spaces.
We encounter people and places that exist only in our memories.
And most of the time, we never question any of it until we wake up.
Lucid dreaming interrupts that process.
For a brief moment, the sleeping mind becomes aware of its own extraordinary condition.
The dream continues.
But the dreamer recognizes it for what it is.
The University of Trento study suggests that this moment of awareness might become more accessible through deliberate training.
Participants practiced meditation, encountered impossible situations in virtual reality, and learned to question unusual experiences.
Weeks later, they reported more lucid-like dreams than participants following standard reality-check routines or using unrelated VR.
The results are preliminary.
The sample was small.
The researchers could not isolate the contributions of meditation and VR.
And the findings need replication with objective sleep measurements and broader participant groups.
Nevertheless, the study offers a fascinating possibility.
Perhaps consciousness is not merely something we experience.
Perhaps some aspects of it can be trained.
Perhaps the habit of asking questions during waking life can eventually follow us into the mysterious world of dreams.
And perhaps, one night, when something impossible happens, the sleeping brain will remember to ask the question that changes everything.
Am I dreaming?
The answer might be yes. And for the first time, you may know it before you wake up.
Scientific Sources and Further Reading
- Signorelli et al. (2026) — Virtual Reality as a Metacognitive Training Tool for Lucid Dreaming. Original peer-reviewed study in Frontiers in Psychology, published September 28, 2026.
- PubMed — University of Trento Lucid Dreaming Study. Indexed abstract, author affiliations, and research findings.
- PubMed Central — Full Open-Access Research Paper. Study design, training procedure, statistical analysis, and limitations.
- Live Science — Neuroscientists Reveal a Method to Train Lucid Dreaming. November 2026 reporting on the study and possible future applications.
- Virtual Reality Training of Lucid Dreaming (2020). Earlier research exploring VR-assisted lucid-dream training and sleep-laboratory verification.
