Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
August 1, 2026
Clarita Bonamino, Clara Hausen, Matthew D. Sacchet
Consciousness can persist, transform, and dissolve across wakefulness, sleep, and advanced meditation. An interdisciplinary perspective reveals converging phenomena that challenge binary accounts of consciousness and highlight its graded, dynamic, and trainable nature. The interface of advanced meditation, sleep, and consciousness science constitutes a promising frontier for understanding the structure, dynamics, and limits of conscious experience. Advanced meditation offers cultivable means for modulating these dimensions, while sleep provides recurring biological states in which awareness, experiential content, embodiment, and sensory input coupling systematically dissociate. Evidence from these domains highlights states such as deep absorption meditation, cessations, lucid dreaming, sleep-wake transitions, and clear light sleep that challenge binary distinctions between consciousness and unconsciousness. An integrated, mixed-methods perspective enables a more nuanced examination of graded and minimal forms of conscious experience.
Journal of Sports Sciences
August 1, 2024
Clarita Bonamino, Christopher Watling, Remco Polman
Lucid dreaming is common among adolescents: 67.4% have experienced it at least once, 30.0% once a month or more, and 12.9% at least once a week. Frequency and uses of lucid dreaming are similar between adolescent athletes and non-athletes. Among those who practiced sports or dance during a lucid dream, 57.1% reported improved waking self-efficacy, while 42.9% reported improved sport performance. There is no evidence that chronotype influences lucid dreaming or that lucid dreaming harms adolescent sleep. Athletes and controls had similar sleep durations, daytime sleepiness, and sleep disturbances, but athletes reported higher sleep quality. Although average sleep met minimum recommendations, a large proportion of adolescents did not get enough sleep, especially on weeknights (47.4% of 14-17 year olds; 20.0% of 18-21 year olds).
Queensland University of Technology
January 1, 2023
Clarita Bonamino
Lucid dreaming, where dreamers are aware they are dreaming and can control events, does not harm sleep health in adolescents. Among both athletes and non-athletes, lucid dreaming provides a safe environment for practicing sports skills and exploring behaviors without real-world consequences. It may contribute to personal growth, mental well-being, increased self-efficacy, and improved motor performance.
Brain Sciences
August 18, 2025
Emma Peters, Clarita Bonamino, Kathrin Fischer et al.
Lucid dreaming, where the dreamer knows they are dreaming, could enable motor practice, well-being, and nightmare therapy, but these applications require dream control, a skill that remains poorly understood. This study explored whether juggling, a complex motor skill, could be performed during lucid dreaming, requiring high dream control and access to procedural memory. Four healthy participants underwent overnight sleep monitoring, provided dream reports, and completed questionnaires. Dream control varied within and between participants. Both dream control and self-efficacy appeared to predict success in the dream motor task. Despite the small sample, the findings suggest individual traits like self-efficacy may shape dream control and motor performance during lucid dreaming.
Clarita Bonamino, Emma Peters
preprint
Lucid dreaming occurs when dreamers know they are dreaming and may influence dream content. Dream control is important for clinical and non-clinical applications, but not all lucid dreamers can effectively manipulate their dreams, and lucidity does not guarantee control. Research on dream manipulation mechanisms, reliability, and effectiveness is limited. This review examines which dream elements (environment, body, narrative) can be influenced, discusses strategies and individual differences, and calls for standardized assessment methods and empirical studies. The Lucid Dream Control General and Lucid Dream Control for Specific Experiences scales are proposed to evaluate dream control proficiency.