Gamers More Likely to Lucid Dream, Study Suggests

Tallon

New research is suggesting that video games not only increase hand eye coordination, but might improve a person's ability to control their dreams. Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada, told Live Science that her studies imply that regular gamers are more likely to experience lucid dreams. She believes that a gamer's comfort with controlling a virtual character in a virtual world translates from 'Halo' to dreaming. She also found that gamers' dreams have certain video game-like characteristics, such as an inability to control anything but their own actions and switching from first to third person views.

Her evidence also suggests that gaming reduces the occurrence of threatening or aggressive dreams, but more importantly, when gamers had such dreams they didn't report being afraid. Instead, game players took on the role of the aggressor. When a threat presented itself in a dream, instead of running and feeling afraid they allegedly stayed and fought back.

Gackenbach believes that video games may actually be a way to combat frequent nightmares and help veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She's now working specifically to identify what effect the violence level of a game has on dreams, and is lobbying to build a proper sleep and virtual reality lab to back up her evidence with quantifiable data.

http://www.switched.com/2010/06/01/gamers-more-likely-to-lucid-dream-study-suggests/

Kiith

Gamers more likely to have ****ed up dreams if my dreams are anything to go by.

chin_grin

I can't really remember my dreams. But I wonder what a cocktail of Res 4, Resi 0, Resi 1, Silent Hill, CoD would produce!

Optimalprimerib

i have noticed before that i do have relative control in my dreams and at times i realise i am dreaming and tend to go with the flow to see how it pans out.

What you may class as a nightmare are enjoyable at times and i reckon that could be due to games or movies

Arfan

I do find I tend to have "game" dreams where I'm playing in an RPG or a shooter or even a disembodied power controlling my minions from above. Lucidity is much harder than that that though, plus dream analysis is a very subjective field.

VinLieger

Ive noticed switching between 1st and third person perspectives and also a small amount of lucidity sometimes

Jazzy

agreed on that.


I've.. seen things you people wouldnt believe....
/Rutger Hauer

Dytalus

As a man who fears sleep and dislikes dreaming, I find this to be a very interesting report. I prescribe myself a healthy dose of video games.

dr gonzo

"when gamers had such dreams they didn't report being afraid."

I dunno. A few years back I had a marathon session of Half Life 2 and spent that entire night dreaming that people i kept coming across had had their faces ripped off by head crabs.

I can therefore report that that it did in fact scare the sh1te out of me.

johanz

Not so long ago I had a dream where me and my friend where special agents in some matrix-like universe and we had to rescue a hostage or something.
It was AMAZING experience. Though I got shot and it actually stung, I wonder why...

Akrasia

Dreaming is very beneficial to becoming a good gamer. (or to learn any skill) I have noticed that when I play a game a lot, usually a FPS and if I dream about that game at night, the next day when I play, i'm way better than the day before.

When you dream that you're playing a game, you seem to be building connections in your brain that links signals to actions

eg, the little red marker that appears over an enemy troop in some fps will have more significance and your brain will specifically look for that little red marker when playing the game, increasing your reaction times enormously.

Your brain will go over strategies and test them in your dreams (which is thought to be one of the primary function of dreams in cognitive development)

PaddyBomb

Did anyone ever dream about the people they play online with even though you've never seen them?

Back when I played Socom non stop, I dreamt about it with my whole clan there :-D

Arfan

I hope they weren't naked.

m5ex9oqjawdg2i

After a few hours of COD: World at War, I tend to find myself running from or towards the Germans for most of my dreams.

One time I was running through a jungle, and I was blasting guys left right and centre, kept running out of ammo but then I would stumble accross a box and it would have health and ammo in it and on I went, shooting more bad guys with my automatic weapons. I was clearing the way for a girl... for some reason. It was a pretty bad linear dream, much rather an open world scenario. Will try that tonight :P

Zillah

I don't really have anything to add to the discussion beyond saying that I think that's a pretty damn cool discovery.

Jazzy

i had a dream last night where retr0gamer suggested a game on this board so I ended up being in the game. it was this weird game where i had to defend a garden against these smoke like creatures using a dog that has a weird temperment. you could buy items and stuff but all the shops were closed that early into the game

BopNiblets

Bah, I've been a gamer for years so how come I don't dream of fending off an army of Bar Refaeli clones with nothing but a whipped cream hose?! :mad: