Lucid dreaming – when a sleeper realises they are dreaming and may be able to influence what happens next – has become a rapidly growing area of sleep neuroscience and psychology. Postdoctoral Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience at Northwestern University, Susana Gabriela Torres-Platas is among the scientists exploring how lucid dreaming can be studied rigorously. On 3 February 2026, Torres-Platas and colleagues posted a preprint (a draft that is yet to be reviewed) titled Intentional Lucid Dreaming with a Transformative Learning Agenda, reporting an initial scientific investigation of Dream Yoga.
If contemplative practices in a waking state are well-documented, Torres-Platas et al shed light on the potential research on what is called Contemplative Sleep Practices (CSPs): structured methods intended to cultivate awareness, intention, and insight during sleep. The research seeks to give academic substance to contemplative experiences described for centuries in different cultural contexts. Far from our usual depiction of dreams as nothing more than a passive by-product of sleep, many cultures describe dreams instead as a distinct mode of experience that can shape how waking reality is understood. Among others, the research ranges from Toltec perspectives in Mesoamerican culture to Sufi mysticism and Judaism traditions. A particular focus of the research is Tibetan Buddhist Dream Yoga, a discipline where practitioners intentionally perform exercises in a state of lucid dream, as a well-documented, systematic practice suited to study.
So what did the researchers actually do? The study reports data from six adults with extensive Dream Yoga training who completed 19 overnight laboratory sessions. Participants slept with full polysomnography – monitoring brain and body activity using electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), electrooculography (EOG), and electrocardiography (ECG), alongside airflow measurements. The researchers also built on new developments in dream research establishing limited two-way communication with lucid dreamers, who can perceive questions and respond using eye movements or subtle facial muscle signals, making it possible to link subjective reports to objective recordings in real time. This allowed Torres-Platas and her colleagues to track changes in brain and body activity linked to states of dream lucidity and yoga exercises.
The results are necessarily modest for a first step, but still noteworthy. Having successfully recorded correspondence between Dream Yoga practitioners reporting lucid dreaming and the researchers recording physiological signals during unequivocal REM sleep, the authors argue they have demonstrated the feasibility of studying Dream Yoga in the laboratory with converging physiological and first-person evidence. This may well open the door to future multidisciplinary studies on lucid dreaming, and the potential benefits that come with it. In particular, it will allow researchers to explore how intentional practices such as lucid dreaming during sleep could support psychological flexibility and well-being.
The authors themselves note that “Dream Yoga enables practitioners to directly engage with the constructed nature of experience in a dream and to reshape habitual perceptual and cognitive schemas.” As our brains continually update “priors” in response to prediction error, practising flexible belief-updating in dreams (for example, learning to believe one can pass through a wall in a state of lucid dreaming) could well lead to new cognitive and emotional habits in a waking state – in other words, to a new relationship with and understanding of reality. These hypotheses will require longitudinal and clinical studies to test, but it is significant and exciting that this new field of inquiry is now being opened.
The benefits of contemplative practices and mindfulness are well-documented, acknowledged and even celebrated globally (see our articles on Meditation World Day and Surprising benefits of Meditation on Brain Health). Susana Torres-Platas and her team’s new line of research therefore stand in this greater tradition while shedding light on a very little explored dimension of contemplative practices.
As the authors of the preprint acknowledge, their discoveries in the science of dreaming largely overlap with and substantiate claims about contemplative practices and the nature of consciousness which predate their own academic disciplines by millennia, and which are found in traditional cultures across the globe. We would like to add that some traditional beliefs have long held that reality is not as rational or clearly defined as we think. For example, Tibetan Buddhism holds that what we believe or do in our dreams affects how we view the world when we are awake. In fact, it goes a step further, stating that our beliefs about the nature of reality even influence the reality itself we live in while awake. This idea, in turn, is not a million miles away from recent quantum physics research.
Perhaps Tibetan Buddhists, Mesoamerican Toltecs, or indeed Sufi mystics still have lessons to teach science.
