Sleep, Dreaming, and Virtual Reality for Mental Health

NCT07408206 | Recruiting Early Phase 1

• 1 other identifier: STU00222189-MOD0004
• Study Type: interventional
• Target: 70
• Locations: 1 country
• Sites: 2

Brief Summary

People spend approximately one-third of their lives asleep, yet sleep is often underused as an opportunity to support psychological well-being. Contemplative traditions, including Tibetan Dream Yoga, have developed practices that use waking imagination and lucid dreaming to explore perception, awareness, and habitual patterns of thinking. Recent advances in sleep monitoring, dream communication, and lucid dream induction now make it possible to study these practices using scientific methods. This study is a randomized controlled trial designed to examine the feasibility and effects of a Dream-Yoga-inspired intervention compared with an active control condition. The intervention combines waking and dreaming practices that are adapted for individuals without prior experience and delivered using virtual reality-based training and home sleep technology. The program is designed to be scalable and culturally neutral, without requiring prior knowledge of contemplative or religious traditions. The primary goals of the study are to characterize sleep and waking neurophysiology associated with Dream-Yoga-inspired practices and to evaluate whether participation is associated with changes in sleep-related brain activity and cognitive processes. Outcomes include measures of lucid dreaming, sleep physiology, and waking cognitive and perceptual processes. Anxiety will be assessed as an exploratory outcome to examine whether participation may be associated with changes in emotional experience. This study is not designed to provide treatment for anxiety or other clinical conditions. Results from this study will help inform the development of scalable sleep-based mental training approaches and guide future research on the use of dreaming and sleep practices to support psychological health and well-being.

Conditions

Anxiety

Keywords

lucid dreaming; dream yoga; contemplative practices; meditation; mind-body interventions

Outcome Measures

Primary Outcomes (2)

• Changes in frontal midline theta

  The intervention will preferentially increase frontal midline theta during a short period of breath meditation (one recording session before and one after the intervention); EEG power band-passed at 4-10 Hz will be quantified and related to findings on self-referential processing (Nondual Awareness Dimensional Assessment)

  Baseline to 8 weeks

• Changes in Sleep Architecture

  Sleep architecture will be compared with regard to time spent in each sleep stage, microarousals, slow-wave power, sleep spindles, and coupling between slow waves and spindles. Spectral power differences in different sleep stages.

  Baseline and 8 weeks

Secondary Outcomes (4)

• Changes in Lucid Dreaming Frequency

  Baseline to 8 weeks

• Changes in Cognitive Flexibility - Cognitive Flexibility Scale

  Baseline to 8 weeks

• Changes in Cognitive Flexibility - Probabilistic Reversal

  Baseline to 8 weeks

• Changes in Cognitive Flexibility - Stroop Test

  Baseline to 8 weeks

Other Outcomes (6)

• Change in PROMIS Anxiety Questionnaire Score

  baseline to 8 weeks

• Change in Self-referential Processing

  Baseline to 8 week

• Changes in Markers of Inflammation

  Baseline to 8 weeks

Study Arms (2)

Dream Yoga Inspired Intervention

EXPERIMENTAL

This customized contemplative training will guide participants in exploring techniques used in Tibetan Dream Yoga. Strategies in Tibetan Dream-Yoga manuals are thus transferred to a modern context and adapted as a group intervention. Goals will be set for dreaming that include gaining a degree of volitional influence over the dream. Wearable devices will be used to present cues during sleep both to provoke lucidity and to remind individuals of Dream-Yoga exercises to be engaged during sleep. Virtual-reality (VR) sessions provide a novel adjunct to Dream Yoga, in keeping with prior research integrating lucid dreaming and VR (Gott et al., 2021). The protocol progresses though several group activities; individuals feel themselves dispersing into a void within the VR world, and then blending with others, leading the reduced self-grasping. If this unique VR component can blur conventional self-other boundaries, it may reinforce the progressive instructions in Dream Yoga.

Behavioral: Dream Yoga Inspired Intervention

Sleep Health Enhancement program

ACTIVE COMPARATOR

A modified version of the Health Enhancement Program (HEP), which was developed as an active control condition for mindfulness-based interventions, with a particular focus on sleep hygiene. It controls for several non-specific factors such as expectations of positive change, group support, behavioural activation, facilitator attention, at-home practice, treatment duration, and format (MacCoon et al., 2012; Rosenkranz et al., 2013). Our modified HEP will be structurally equivalent to the Dream-Yoga condition, with high similarity on non-program-specific factors, including timing and number of sessions. The VR sessions will focus on health enhancement. Participants will be taught positive health-enhancing practices, such as healthy diet and gentle exercise, with activity-based sessions covering exercise, sleep, dreaming, stress, anxiety, nutrition, journaling, music enjoyment, and drawing. Home practice and implementation will be similar in both groups.

Behavioral: Sleep Health Enhancement Program (SHEP)

Interventions

Dream Yoga Inspired Intervention BEHAVIORAL

This customized contemplative training will guide participants in exploring techniques used in Tibetan Dream Yoga. Strategies in Tibetan manuals are thus transferred to a modern context and adapted as a group intervention. Goals will be set for dreaming that include gaining lucidity, a degree of volitional influence over the dream. Participants will be instructed on how to work with their dream-world self-concept, which can include changing the environment deliberately, making other individuals appear, and switching identities with other individuals in the dream. Wearable devices will be used to present cues during sleep both to provoke lucidity and to remind individuals of Dream-Yoga exercises to be engaged during sleep. The intervention includes both wake- and sleep-based instructions, with instructions on learning to apply the new orientation in their daily lives.

Also known as: Dream Yoga, Contemplative Sleep Practice Intervention

Dream Yoga Inspired Intervention

Sleep Health Enhancement Program (SHEP) BEHAVIORAL

The control group will receive a modified version of the Health Enhancement Program (HEP), which was developed as an active control condition for mindfulness-based interventions, with a particular focus on sleep hygiene and dream journaling. It controls for several non-specific factors such as expectations of positive change, group support, behavioural activation, facilitator attention, at-home practice, treatment duration, and format (MacCoon et al., 2012; Rosenkranz et al., 2013). Our modified HEP will be structurally equivalent to the Dream-Yoga condition, with high similarity on non-program-specific factors, including timing and number of sessions. The two VR sessions will focus on relaxation. Participants will be taught positive health-enhancing practices, such as healthy diet and gentle exercise, with activity-based sessions covering exercise, sleep, dreaming, stress, anxiety, nutrition, journaling, music enjoyment, and drawing.

Also known as: Health Enhancement Program

Sleep Health Enhancement program

Eligibility Criteria

• Age: 18 Years+
• Sex: all
• Healthy Volunteers: Yes
• Age Groups: Adult (18-64), Older Adult (65+)

You may qualify if:

• Individuals interested in participating will be screened for eligibility through a Qualtrics survey, a Score between 5-21 points in GAD-7.
• Healthy, English-speaking adults (at least 18 years old) with high dream recall (at least 1/week).

You may not qualify if:

• We will exclude people who self-report any of the following:
• history of an established meditative practice
• psychological or psychiatric disorders (other than mild anxiety)
• sleep disorders, nightshift work in the past month, extreme chronotype or irregular sleeping pattern
• use of recreational drugs in the past month
• history of asthma, seizures or heart problems
• unwillingness to wear headband during sleep

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Northwestern University: lead
• University of Virginia: collaborator

Study Sites (2)

Northwestern University

Evanston, Illinois, 60208, United States

RECRUITING

Contemplative Sciences Center

Charlottesville, Virginia, 22903-2628, United States

RECRUITING

MeSH Terms

Conditions

Anxiety Disorders

Condition Hierarchy (Ancestors)

Mental Disorders

Central Study Contacts

S. Gabriela Torres Platas, Ph.D.

CONTACT

(847) 491-3741; gabriela.torresplatas@northwestern.edu

Study Design

• Study Type: interventional
• Phase: early phase 1
• Allocation: RANDOMIZED
• Masking: DOUBLE
• Who Masked: PARTICIPANT, OUTCOMES ASSESSOR
• Masking Details: Participants are blinded to the condition of their group. They don't know if they are in the intervention study or control. The outcome assessor is blinded to allocation.
• Purpose: TREATMENT
• Intervention Model: PARALLEL
• Sponsor Type: OTHER
• Responsible Party: PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
• PI Title: Professor

Study Record Dates

• First Submitted: February 6, 2026
• First Posted: February 13, 2026
• Study Start: January 15, 2026
• Primary Completion (Estimated): October 31, 2026
• Study Completion (Estimated): December 31, 2027
• Last Updated: February 18, 2026

Record last verified: 2026-01

Data Sharing

• IPD Sharing: Will share
• Shared Documents: STUDY PROTOCOL, ICF
• Time Frame: IPD will be made available beginning 6 months after publication of the primary results and will remain available for 5 years.

Locations

US (2)