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Gamers More Likely to Lucid Dream, Study Suggests

by Terrence O'Brien on June 1, 2010 at 08:30 AM

Lucid dream game
New research is suggesting that video games not only increase hand eye coordination, but might improve a person's ability to control their dreams. Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada, told Live Science that her studies imply that regular gamers are more likely to experience lucid dreams. She believes that a gamer's comfort with controlling a virtual character in a virtual world translates from 'Halo' to dreaming. She also found that gamers' dreams have certain video game-like characteristics, such as an inability to control anything but their own actions and switching from first to third person views.

Her evidence also suggests that gaming reduces the occurrence of threatening or aggressive dreams, but more importantly, when gamers had such dreams they didn't report being afraid. Instead, game players took on the role of the aggressor. When a threat presented itself in a dream, instead of running and feeling afraid they allegedly stayed and fought back.

Gackenbach believes that video games may actually be a way to combat frequent nightmares and help veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She's now working specifically to identify what effect the violence level of a game has on dreams, and is lobbying to build a proper sleep and virtual reality lab to back up her evidence with quantifiable data. [From: Live Science, Via: Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

Tags: dreams, lucid dreams, LucidDreams, post-traumatic stress disorder, Post-traumaticStressDisorder, psychology, PTSD, science, top, videogames

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