Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

Neural Correlates of Contemplative Sleep Practices

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

S. Gabriela Torres Platas¹ (susana.torresplatas@northwestern.edu), Daniel Morris¹, James Glazer¹, Karen Konkoly¹, Ema Demšar², Michael Sheehy³, David Germano³, Ken Paller¹; ¹Northwestern University, ²Monash University, ³University of Virginia

Recent neuroscientific advances have provided new ways to investigate dream experiences. For centuries, Buddhist traditions have described advanced forms of contemplative practice during sleep. Tibetan Dream Yoga is a suite of such practices that includes waking-imagination exercises and strategies to induce lucid dreaming—awareness of the dream state while one is still in the dream. Evidence suggests that these practices can produce a virtual environment for training in various dream scenarios that results in adaptive insights for one’s waking life. In this study, we assess the feasibility of studying highly trained dream-yoga practitioners in a laboratory. Individuals were interviewed to document their prior contemplative training before visiting a sleep laboratory for overnight sessions with standard polysomnographic recordings. Participants were trained to associate specific sounds with a small set of lucid-dream experiences. Then, during Rapid-Eye Movement (REM) sleep, these sounds were presented to help individuals achieve lucid dreaming and perform specific tasks. Participants used combinations of distinctive eye-movement and respiratory signals to communicate to back to experimenters. These signals thus provided a time-stamp for their dream experiences in polysomnographic data. After waking, participants completed a micro-phenomenological interview and a battery of standard questionnaires and cognitive testing. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of a multidisciplinary approach to studying neural correlates and the phenomenology of contemplative sleep practices. We aim to produce a comprehensive understanding of these contemplative sleep practices and neural correlates to gain insights into how individuals can use their sleep to produce various waking benefits.

Topic Area: OTHER