Transformative Benefits of Contemplative Sleep Practices

Aims: (1) Test whether dreaming holds a key to understanding assumptions that tacitly constrain our waking lives. (2) Quantify effects of Dream-Yoga-inspired procedures for exploring and surmounting constraints of the perception box.

Background: People spend a third of their lives asleep, usually oblivious to the opportunities for enhanced well-being that sleep offers. Over centuries, Tibetan-Buddhist contemplatives developed and documented techniques for breaking through the perception box. They deconstructed conventional reality and noted that ordinary waking experience is like a dream, in that we tend to grasp onto perceptual objects, thoughts, or ideas without understanding their interdependent, impermanent, and mentally constructed nature. Dream-Yoga includes progressive waking-imagination and lucid-dreaming exercises to work through perceptual rigidities and alter deeply ingrained habits, so ideas, feelings, and emotions become less boxed-in. Recent methodological advances enable novel scientific explorations of Dream-Yoga and these perceptual shifts. Whereas the science of dreaming suffered historically from inadequate strategies, a new era has dawned driven by innovations in physiological sleep monitoring, two-way communication during the dream state, and lucid-dream induction (Carr et al., 2023: 50%-success-rate). ACTIVITIES: We examine Dream-Yoga-inspired practices as readily accessible tools for exploring and then surmounting the perception box. This is a randomized controlled trial comparing an online Dream-Yoga-inspired intervention to an active-control procedure. The intervention includes practices during dreaming and waking, whereby novices learn to cultivate specific skills. We are thus developing and testing a scalable methodology for Dream-Yoga, suitable for broad dissemination to interested individuals. NEED/OUTPUTS/IMPACT: There is a glaring worldwide need to optimize sleep. Poor sleep is associated with many psychiatric and neurological disorders. The high prevalence of insomnia and suboptimal sleeping also contributes to other problems (e.g., low work-productivity, depression, suicidality). Here we combine a new orientation known as sleep engineering (using strategic sensory stimulation) and a novel regimen of sleep-and wake-based mental exercises, guided by contemplative insights, to enhance psychological health and well-being. Our intervention and open-source strategies are designed to be made widely available to the public, as emphasized in the outreach-dissemination phase. Results will be shared in academic publications following open-science principles. HYPOTHESES: A brief online intervention in a randomized controlled trial will show enhanced cognitive flexibility, perceptual plasticity, creative insight, and reduced self-referential focus and anxiety.