Researchers at the University of Trento tested whether a purpose-built VR application, paired with a short meditation, could help people with little lucid-dreaming experience have lucid dreams. The app, LucidDreamingVR, was developed by the Italian Buddhist Union (UBI) Research Center from Tibetan Dream Yoga principles. It places users in dream-like scenes where they practise spotting odd "dream signs" and performing reality checks, the routines used to trigger lucidity. The randomized trial was published in Frontiers in Psychology on 28 September 2026.
Study design
- Participants: 38 adults aged 18 to 40 with low lucid-dream recall and under 2 hours of prior VR exposure, recruited at the University of Trento.
- VR-experimental (13): standard training plus eight LucidDreamingVR laboratory sessions over 4 weeks, twice weekly. Each session was about 15 minutes of seated guided open-monitoring meditation followed by about 20 minutes of room-scale interactive VR.
- VR-control (12): standard training plus eight 20-minute sessions in a visually similar but lucid-dream-unrelated VR application that involved finding hidden baseballs, with no meditation.
- Control (13): standard training only, meaning a daily dream diary, reality checks and a daily questionnaire.
Participants were allocated by stratified randomization. All groups kept diaries for 35 consecutive days, and the VR arms used a Meta Quest 3 headset connected by Air Link to a gaming desktop.
Findings
Outcomes were self-reported in at-home diaries and questionnaires, with semi-lucid and lucid dreams analysed together as "lucid-like".
- Rate of lucid-like dreams: these made up 11.82% of recalled dreams in the VR-experimental group (26 dreams), 2.96% in Control (11) and 1.37% in VR-control (4). The VR-experimental rate was 8.60 times the VR-control rate and 4.00 times the Control rate (both Holm-adjusted p<0.001). Control and VR-control did not differ significantly.
- Participants with at least one lucid-like dream: 11 of 13 (84.6%) in VR-experimental, 8 of 13 (61.5%) in Control and 4 of 12 (33.3%) in VR-control. Only the VR-experimental versus VR-control difference was significant after correction.
- Dream recall: recall was lowest in the VR-experimental group (47.0% of nights, versus 52.6% for VR-control and 59.5% for Control). The authors state the lucid-like effect is not explained by increased recall.
Generic VR exposure on its own did not help. The VR-control group had the lowest lucid-like rate of the three arms.
Limitations and interpretation
The authors describe the results as preliminary evidence. Neither control arm included meditation, so the study cannot separate the contribution of meditation from that of the dream-like VR content. Other author-stated limitations are the reliance on at-home self-report without sleep-lab verification, which leaves room for demand effects, a modest sample of 38, and no assessment of prior meditation experience. Daniel Morris of Northwestern University, who was not involved, suggested the experimental group may have been less motivated to report non-lucid dreams. A fifth week followed the VR phase with only baseline training and questionnaires, and no longer-term follow-up is reported. The team is running a follow-up study with the meditation removed.
Institutions, funding and conflicts
The study was ethically approved by the University of Trento Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science and was funded by the UBI Research Center, which owns LucidDreamingVR. The paper states the funder had no other role in design, data collection, analysis, interpretation or the decision to publish. Co-author F. Tormen provides paid scientific consultancy to the UBI Research Center, not contingent on outcomes, and contributed to the app concept, but per the paper was not involved in study design, recruitment, data collection or analysis.
