Transformative Benefits of Contemplative Sleep Practices and a Novel Pathway to Deliver Benefits to the General Public
试验速览
- 阶段
- 1 期
- 状态
- 招募中
- 入组人数
- 70
- 试验地点
- 2
- 主要终点
- Changes in frontal midline theta
研究概览
简要总结
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.
详细描述
Dream Yoga is a contemplative practice with a documented history spanning more than a millennium, described in traditional manuals as a set of waking and sleep-based exercises intended to cultivate insight, perceptual flexibility, and altered self-referential processing. These practices include the intentional induction of lucid dreaming, in which individuals become aware that they are dreaming and may exert varying degrees of volitional influence over dream content. Advances in sleep physiology, polysomnography, wearable sleep monitoring, and methods for inducing and verifying lucid dreams now make it possible to examine such practices using objective neurophysiological measures.
This randomized controlled trial evaluates the effects of a Dream-Yoga-inspired intervention compared with an active control condition in healthy adults without prior contemplative training. The intervention adapts core elements of traditional Dream Yoga into a standardized, secular program designed for accessibility and scalability. The study focuses on characterizing sleep and waking neurophysiological features associated with participation in the intervention and assessing changes in lucid dreaming, cognitive, and perceptual measures. Anxiety is assessed as an exploratory outcome.
Study Design and Procedures
Participants are randomly assigned to either a Dream-Yoga-inspired intervention or a structurally matched active control condition. All participants complete baseline ("pre") and post-intervention ("post") assessments separated by an eight-week intervention period. Baseline procedures include informed consent, demographic questionnaires, neuropsychological testing, and self-report measures. Participants receive standardized training in the use of home sleep monitoring devices and study procedures.
Throughout the four-week intervention, participants attend weekly virtual group sessions of approximately 35 mins each, led by trained facilitators. Both study arms are matched for contact time, group interaction, facilitator attention, and homework expectations. Participants complete daily brief self-report measures related to sleep and dreaming during the intervention period.
研究设计
- 研究类型
- Interventional
- 分配方式
- Randomized
- 干预模型
- Parallel
- 主要目的
- Treatment
- 盲法
- Double (Participant, Outcomes Assessor)
盲法说明
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.
入排标准
- 年龄范围
- 18 Years 至 —（Adult, Older Adult）
- 性别
- All
- 接受健康志愿者
- 是
入选标准
- •Individuals interested in participating will be screened for eligibility through a Qualtrics survey, a Score between 5-21 points in GAD-
- •Healthy, English-speaking adults (at least 18 years old) with high dream recall (at least 1/week).
排除标准
- •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
研究组 & 干预措施
Dream Yoga Inspired Intervention
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.
干预措施: Dream Yoga Inspired Intervention (Behavioral)
Sleep Health Enhancement program
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.
干预措施: Sleep Health Enhancement Program (SHEP) (Behavioral)
结局指标
主要结局
Changes in frontal midline theta
时间窗: Baseline to 8 weeks
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)
Changes in Sleep Architecture
时间窗: Baseline and 8 weeks
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.
次要结局
- Changes in Cognitive Flexibility - Cognitive Flexibility Scale(Baseline to 8 weeks)
- Changes in Lucid Dreaming Frequency(Baseline to 8 weeks)
- Changes in Cognitive Flexibility - Probabilistic Reversal(Baseline to 8 weeks)
- Changes in Cognitive Flexibility - Stroop Test(Baseline to 8 weeks)
研究者
Ken Paller
Professor
Northwestern University