CSC's CIRCL Awarded Funding to Study Contemplative Sleep Practices

The Tiny Blue Dot Foundation announced the funding of twelve neuroscientific research projects related to “The Science of Perception Box.” CIRCL, CSC's Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab, is among the awardees along with collaborators at Northwestern University for their study, "Transformative Benefits of Contemplative Sleep Practices and a Novel Pathway to Deliver Benefits to the General Public." 

This project aims to characterize ways for individuals to learn how to use their dreaming experiences to expand their perceptual horizons in the waking state. It seeks to understand how contemplative sleep practices can transform mental life, developing the methodology and technology to make such strategies widely accessible, combining wake contemplative training with novel uses of virtual reality and sleep engineering. Each project receiving three consecutive years of funding of up to $900,000. 

About CIRCL
CSC pursues multidisciplinary research through its in-house lab, CIRCL - The Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab. CIRCL is: (i) a dynamically experimental space in the Contemplative Commons; and (ii) a transdisciplinary research collaborative of faculty on UVA’s Grounds and beyond invested in humanistic, scientific, and creative understandings and applications of contemplation.

Abstract

Although people spend a third of their lives asleep, they seldom recognize the tremendous opportunities for enhanced well-being that sleep offers. Contemplative dreaming with a set of intentional practices, as used for many centuries in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, provides an opportunity to deconstruct conventional reality and work through normal perceptual rigidity. In this project, we seek to understand how contemplative sleep practices can transform mental life. We are developing the methodology and technology to make such strategies widely accessible, combining wake contemplative training with novel uses of virtual reality and sleep engineering.

Based on our prior work, we are also using interactive dreaming to allow for the real-time analysis of dream experiences and their neural correlates. Our new methods will provoke lucid dreams (which occur when a person recognizes that they are dreaming while still asleep) and can even be successful in people with no prior experience with lucid dreaming. We will attempt to increase lucid dreaming with these strategies using a wireless device for measuring EEG in the home.

We will also develop a virtual-reality experience to attempt to enhance the impact of an intervention based on contemplative dreaming. Additionally, results from experts in contemplative dreaming will help us understand how wake-based and sleep-based practices are effectively combined. We hypothesize that these experts will be able to respond to prompts during lucid dreams in accordance with plans set before sleep.

This project will thus produce knowledge about how advanced dreaming can help people radically adjust habitual tendencies to transcend the ordinary limits of perception. In our outreach phase, we will share our contemplative-dreaming intervention with the public. Understanding the potential benefits of contemplative dreaming will also support future research exploring a variety of methods for Perception Box expansion.