Can Virtual Reality Teach You to Know You Are Dreaming?

UnderSelf editorial desk · October 17, 2026 · 2 min read · Source: frontiersin.org

On September 28, 2026, Andrea Signorelli, Francesco Tormen, Bruna Dal Bianco and Nicola De Pisapia published a study in Frontiers in Psychology asking whether a virtual reality program built to rehearse the mental habits behind lucid dreaming could raise lucid dream rates beyond ordinary training, and whether any VR would do the same. They followed 38 participants with little previous lucid dreaming experience through five weeks of daily dream diaries and reality checks, split into three groups. The group using the dream-oriented VR program reported 26 lucid-like dreams, the control group 11, and the group using generic VR 4. The authors read that as VR exposure alone not being enough, and suggest that dream-oriented VR training preceded by open monitoring meditation may help by carrying metacognitive monitoring from waking life into REM sleep.

Lucid dreaming, as the paper puts it, "involves awareness of being in a dream during REM sleep," and it rests on metacognitive and reality-monitoring processes. Put plainly, it is the habit of noticing your own mind at work, practiced awake until it shows up asleep. That is a quieter idea than the usual picture of flying on command, and it fits what the daily reality checks were for.

Read it with its limits in view. The outcomes came from at-home diaries, with no sleep lab recording to confirm a dream was lucid. The sample was small. The package bundled diaries, reality checks, VR and meditation, so the authors could not say which part did the work. And the study was funded by the UBI Research Center, with one author paid as a scientific consultant there; the paper states that the VR program itself is owned by UBI. None of that sinks the finding; it is the reason to hold it as a first look.

The paper measured lucid-like dreams, nothing about how anyone slept or felt afterward, so it says nothing there. What it does show is how much of the method is plain record keeping. When you wake from a dream, is there a moment inside it where you noticed what was happening, or does that only show up when you tell it back?

If you keep a dream diary at all, the spoken version is the easiest to start. Try a free reading with tomorrow morning's dream.