Sleep and Dreaming Practices for Anxiety
What You Need to Know Before You Apply
What is the purpose of this trial?
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
Are You a Good Fit for This Trial?
This trial is for healthy, English-speaking adults over 18 who often remember their dreams (at least once a week) and score between 5-21 on the GAD-7 anxiety scale. It's not suitable for those seeking treatment for clinical conditions.Inclusion Criteria
Timeline for a Trial Participant
Screening
Participants are screened for eligibility to participate in the trial
Baseline Assessment
Participants complete informed consent, demographic questionnaires, neuropsychological testing, and self-report measures. Training in the use of home sleep monitoring devices is provided.
Intervention
Participants undergo an 8-week intervention period with weekly virtual group sessions. The intervention includes Dream-Yoga-inspired practices or a Health Enhancement Program, with additional VR sessions and home practice.
Post-Intervention Assessment
Participants undergo post-intervention assessments, including neurophysiological measures and self-report questionnaires.
Follow-up
Participants are monitored for changes in sleep-related brain activity and cognitive processes after the intervention.
What Are the Treatments Tested in This Trial?
Interventions
- Dream Yoga Inspired Intervention
Trial Overview
The study tests a Dream-Yoga-inspired program using virtual reality training and sleep technology against an active control condition to improve psychological well-being through better sleep and dreaming practices.
How Is the Trial Designed?
2
Treatment groups
Experimental Treatment
Active Control
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.
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 two 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 impleme
Find a Clinic Near You
Who Is Running the Clinical Trial?
Northwestern University
Lead Sponsor
University of Virginia
Collaborator
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