Can lucid dreaming be harmful?

By Jocelyn TimperleyFeatures correspondent@jloistf

Emmanuel LafontMany see lucid dreaming as a doorway to wish fulfilment and creativity, but could it have a harmful side? (Credit: Emmanuel Lafont)

Controlling the action in a dream is an appealing concept that has attracted enormous attention over the years, but there could be risks if inducing them infringes on sleep quality

Interest in lucid dreaming – awareness of dreaming while sleeping – has been on the rise over the past decade or so, with a particularly big spike in internet searches mid-pandemic.

Since it's hard to induce lucid dreams reliably, scientists have been busy working out the best ways to induce these types of dreams.

Lucid dreaming enthusiasts often cite a long list of its potential benefits as a reason for doing this, from the chance to have fun and fulfil wishes by controlling aspects of your dreams to sparking creative thinking and even helping athletic endeavours.

But could there be any downsides to lucid dreaming? And are there times when you probably should steer clear of trying to do it? Research shows the answer is: yes...probably.

"In popular media, everyone talks about how lucid dreaming will change your life, and [how] it's so great…[But] almost no one talks about any dangers or caution," says Nirit Soffer-Dudek, a clinical psychology researcher at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. "I think that more carefulness is needed, in terms of thinking about who this is good for and who it isn't."

The attraction of lucid dreaming

There is often a large focus on the potential benefits of lucid dreaming, and for good reason – studies have revealed some fascinating results.

The most effective lucid dreaming techniques

This involves waking up after five or so hours of sleep and setting an intention to have a lucid dream by repeating the phrase "next time I'm dreaming, I will remember I'm dreaming" before going back to sleep.

In one study, researchers who asked people to do squats during lucid dreaming saw an increase in heart rate and to some extent respiration in the sleepers, almost as if they were doing the exercise for real, while another study found practising finger-tapping in lucid dreams can significantly improve the same skill in waking life.

Lucid dreaming has also been suggested as a potential way to help people who have frequent nightmares or nightmare disorders.

"If you can become lucid during a nightmare you can change your response or do something that empowers you in real time and improve your capacity to cope with the nightmare," says Denholm Aspy, a visiting research fellow in psychology at the University of Adelaide in Australia. "Some people have reported that they completely stop having nightmares."

A 2019 review agreed that lucid dreaming could be a feasible aid to treat nightmares, but concluded that research on this is currently too limited to estimate real therapeutic outcomes in clinical practice.

Some researchers have also suggested lucid dreaming could potentially be used to treat serious psychological disorders such as clinical depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The risks

Given all this, it is easy to see the appeal of inducing lucid dreams. However, there are some clear situations when lucid dreaming is best avoided. In particular, people with certain mental health conditions, such as schizophrenia, psychosis or bipolar disorder, or manic phase, should avoid inducing lucid dreams as it might exacerbate those conditions, says Aspy.

Karen Kolkony, a PhD researcher in psychology at Northwestern University in Illinois, agrees that lucid dream induction techniques might be ungrounding for people with these conditions. "[It] kind of causes you to think about reality, question reality. That might be unhelpful for people who are already having issues thinking about what reality is."

In 2016, a study in Brazil looked at the links between lucid dreaming and psychiatric symptoms in people with and without schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. It concluded that lucid dreaming in a psychotic population could "further empower deliria and hallucinations, giving internal reality the appearance of external reality".

Emmanuel LafontIn one study (Stumbrys et al., 2015), people who practised finger-tapping in their lucid dreams also improved their ability during waking life (Credit: Emmanuel Lafont)

But while it's widely agreed that if someone is psychotic, they should not practise these techniques, Soffer-Dudek says, "maybe if someone is in a risk group for psychoticism, [a personality type that exhibits traits such as impulsivity, aggression and antisocial behaviour], then they also shouldn't".

In a 2018 paper, Soffer-Dudek and her student Liat Aviram set out to examine the possible change in various psychopathological symptoms – namely depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, schizotypy (a milder analogue of the symptoms of schizophrenia) or experiences of dissociation – following the use of lucid dreaming techniques.

Intuitively, it seemed to me that a lot of the techniques for inducing lucid dreams are inherently impairing sleep hygiene – Nirit Soffer-Dudek

Soffer-Dudek has a background in sleep research, which had sparked her concern that regularly induced lucid dreaming might represent a more aroused state of sleep, which could lead to sleep disturbance. She was also concerned that some of the techniques to induce lucid dreams could be having an impact on sleep quality. The worry was that this sleep disturbance could itself lead to an increase in psychopathologies.

"I was very aware of all of the thousands of studies done on the importance of sleep, and of sleep hygiene," says Soffer-Dudek. "Intuitively, it seemed to me that a lot of the techniques for inducing lucid dreams are inherently impairing sleep hygiene." She suspected that for some people, this could be harmful.

In Soffer-Dudek and Aviram’s study, 187 undergraduate psychology students completed an online questionnaire about their lucid dreaming experiences and their use of lucid dreaming induction techniques, and were asked about any psychopathological symptoms. Just under half of these students participated in a second phase two months later where they completed the same questionnaire again, then keeping a dream diary for 14 days. The researchers then looked at whether reported lucid dreams predicted an increase or a decrease in psychopathological symptoms.

Around a third of the participants were found to be using lucid dreaming techniques (the number would likely be far lower in a general population, says Soffer-Dudek, since psychology students tend to have a particular interest in topics like lucid dreaming), and the study did indeed find a negative effect for participants using techniques to induce lucid dreaming. In people who in the first wave had tried to induce lucid dreaming deliberately, two of the symptoms – dissociative experiences and schizotypy – increased over the time between the two waves of assessment, she says.

"These two types of symptoms are exactly [those] that relate to boundaries between sleep and waking, or between dream and reality… things that are a bit related to being confused between what's real and not real."

Soffer-Dudek emphasises much of the issue seems to be with lucid dreaming techniques, rather than lucid dreaming itself. Other research support this: in a 2021 study, Tadas Stumbrys, assistant professor in psychology at Vilnius University in Lithuania, conducted an online survey of 500 participants to look at whether lucid dreaming frequency had any adverse effects on sleep quality, dissociation or mental wellbeing. It found no negative impacts for sleep quality or dissociation and also found that those who were using it reported greater mental wellbeing.

Disrupted sleep?

But Stumbrys agrees that there could be negative effects on sleep if people deploy lucid dreaming techniques too frequently. "My understanding of all the scientific evidence, is that it is not the experience itself that has a somewhat detrimental effect, either mental and physical, on health," he says. "But it's more that if some people are becoming too obsessed with lucid dreaming, and then are putting a lot of effort [into it], that obviously has effects on their sleep."

Soffer-Dudek considers the wake-back-to-bed technique the most direct threat to getting a good night's sleep. This is a technique which involves waking up after four to six hours of sleep, and when combined with exercises focused on inducing lucid dreams it is one of the effective ways to induce lucid dreams.

"There are a lot of studies showing the importance of getting a good night's sleep," says Soffer-Dudek. "Waking yourself up at 4am and staying up and then going back to sleep, you know, it's not good for you. There's no doubt about it."

Other techniques, such as reality monitoring, where you are constantly asking yourself whether you are asleep or awake, is also "exactly the opposite of sleep hygiene good practice", she adds, and could be especially problematic for people who already have sleep problems.

Emmanuel LafontThe wake-back-to-bed technique could be the most direct threat to getting a good night's sleep, says Soffer-Dudek (Credit: Emmanuel Lafont)

But other research has found induced lucid dreams to be associated with more positive dream content and a better waking mood the next day. And a 2020 study found that participants reported feeling more refreshed after a night where they remembered having a lucid dream than nights when they remembered a non-lucid dream. "That's of course explainable because the person was happy to have a lucid dream, so the positive effects [of having] a nice lucid dream [mean] you're feeling better during the day," says Michael Schredl, a researcher at the sleep laboratory in the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany and lead author of the paper.

However, the study also found that this refreshed feeling was reduced if participants had used the wake-up-back-to-bed technique – unless they were able to sleep in for longer than usual the next morning.

There is also the frustrating that comes with repeatedly trying, but failing to lucid dream.

People who aren’t successful in their attempts to lucid dream have poorer sleep, according another study, although people who successfully have a lucid dream experience the same sleep quality as the nights when they didn't have lucid dreams. "If you can do the technique and fall back asleep quickly, then that doesn't seem to be a problem," says Aspy, who led the research.

How about the time you actually spend lucid dreaming, could that impact your sleep? Probably not, says Aspy. "For the average person who doesn't have many lucid dreams normally… most of your dreams are probably going to be non-lucid," he says. "So at worst, the amount of dreaming time that you're messing around with is only a small percentage of your dreams, you're still going to have lots of non-lucid dreams anyway."

Lucid nightmares

There are other potential negative aspects of lucid dreaming. Aspy notes that some lucid dreaming techniques can increase the chance of sleep paralysis. "That can be very unpleasant," he says, although noting sleep paralysis can also be used to have more lucid dreams if you know how. "But some people just want to avoid it entirely." (Read more about the nightmares that leave you paralysed in this piece by the BBC's Luke Mintz.)

In a 2016 study, researchers found that experiences of lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis were linked in their participants – but in particular this correlation was seen for intense vestibular-motor hallucinations, the more positive type of sleep paralysis featuring out-of-body experiences or the sensation of floating. Sleep paralysis, but not lucid dreaming, was associated with poorer sleep quality and greater stress and anxiety, they found.

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Other studies have linked other negative outcomes from lucid dreaming to the induction techniques. In a study in 2022 which looked at whether Reddit posts about lucid dreaming were positive or negative concluded that "lucid dreams can end nightmares and prevent their recurrence, but they can also induce harrowing dysphoric dreams". The authors concluded that these negative outcomes "primarily result from failed induction attempts or lucid dreams with low dream-control". Successfully inducing high-control lucid dreams, meanwhile, poses a low risk for negative outcomes, they conclude.

However, even lucid dreamers with generally high levels of control of their dreams can experience lucid nightmares: terrifying lucid dreams with a lack of dream control. In a 2018 study, Stumbrys found that more frequent lucid dreamers who show greater control over the plot of their dream and have better lucid dream skills are more likely to have lucid nightmares, although it also found these lucid nightmares are rare and seem to be more associated with spontaneous rather than deliberately-induced lucid dreams.

Schredl, who has also studied lucid nightmares, recommends using imagery rehearsal therapy – learning within waking life to rescript and change the nightmare to end in a way that's less distressing – to mitigate lucid nightmares. He also advises not to try to wake up, as if you are unsuccessful, this can actually increase the anxiety. Those using lucid dreaming to address nightmares should also ensure to use imagery rehearsal therapy to avoid lucid nightmares he adds.

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Despite this complex picture behind the pros and cons of lucid dreaming, in many cases pursuing lucid dreaming induction will come down to personal choice.

Soffer-Dudek says she isn't against lucid dreaming or using lucid dreaming techniques, but just wants people to weigh up the possible risks. "If you have risk factors, like you have sleep problems, or you have mental health issues that are kind of serious, like depression or things in the direction of schizophrenia, definitely, you should be wary of the risks," she says.

"Some of these techniques are really designed to kind of blur the boundaries between sleep and dreaming. It might leave you more confused, feeling more derealisation, kind of feeling detached, if you do it on a regular basis. And that's a risk that people should consider."

 

* Jocelyn Timperley is a senior journalist for BBC Future. Find her on Twitter @jloistf

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