Fascinating story

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Could regular forays into virtual reality actually trigger lucid dreams, too? A 

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Gackenbach conducted in conjunction with her study finds a correlation between heavy Rift usage and increased dream lucidity. Participants, including both Rift developers and gamers, described having increasingly lucid dreams as they spent more time immersed in virtual reality. “I seem more in control of my dreams now and am somewhat aware that it is a dream,” one technical writer reported.

This makes intuitive sense to me, since many VR experiences, like

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, already feel like lucid dreaming. If this phenomenon scales to the wider population, it may turn out to be one of the most interesting and worthwhile use cases for VR:

After all, we spend roughly one-third of our lives in dreamtime consciousness, and most of us do not only not have any control over that experience, but often, it's disturbing or confusing. From what we know, it takes weeks and weeks of practice to lucidly dream -- keeping a daily dream journal, consistently jotting down dreams when you wake up, etc. -- so a technology that's relatively easy and fun to use which enhances that training could be a massive benefit to helping us explore this undiscovered country of the mind.

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