Research suggests gamers can control their dreams

A psychologist at Grant MacWean University in Canada reckons that people who play videogames more often are more likely to be able to control their dreams. Jayne Gackenbach surveyed the dreams of both non-gamers and hardcore gamers, and found that those who frequently played games experienced lucid dreams more often.

“If you’re spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it’s practice,” said Gackenbach. “Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams.” While the findings are preliminary, and haven’t been backed up by other studies elsewhere, they have some precedence in that lucid dreamers and gamers have both been reported separately as being less prone to motion sickness and exhibiting better spatial skills.

However, correlation is not causation, so Gackenbach assembled groups of college students and asked them how often they had lucid dreams, where they could actively influence and change their dreams. Those who played videogames were more likely to report lucidity, but interestingly they reported being limited to just controlling to their dream selves — rather than having control over the entire dream world.

Gackenbach has since replicated her findings a few times over, and controlled for factors like the frequency of recalling dreams. “The first time we simply asked people how often they had lucid dreams, looking back over their life and making judgment calls,” Gackenbach told LiveScience. “That’s open to all kinds of bias, [such as] certain memory biases, self-reported biases.”

She also discovered that gamers are troubled less by nightmares than non-gamers, which matches up with Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo’s “threat simulation” theory. That theory suggests that nightmares evolved to help people practice for life-threatening situations in a safe environment. In gamers, the thinking goes, they get to practice those situations in games so have less need of nightmares.

Gackenbach took 35 males and 63 females, and found that gamers experienced less threat simulation in dreams than non-gamers, with fewer “aggresssion” dreams overall. Interestingly, gamers also reported sometimes becoming the threatening presence themselves. Future research, Gackenbach says, will be targeted at studying the violence levels in games, and how they affect this phenomenon. Do kids’ games have the same effect as more mature, violent titles?

The research could help in a number of areas, particularly with helping war veterans troubled by nightmares and post-traumatic stress disorder. Virtual reality simulators have already been used to treat some people suffering from nightmares after enduring combat. The question is whether games could have the same effect.

The work will be discussed at the sixth annual Games for Health conference in Boston.