Not much research on lucid dreaming has come out of Asia so far. At the same time, the only study conducted in China in 2008 shocked scientists from other countries, showing that the frequency of lucid dreaming in China is 92% – the highest recorded rate in the world.
A new study earlier this year by researchers at South China Normal University in Guangzhou found that the lucid dreaming rate was actually closer to 81.3%. But this was not the main focus of the study. The authors draw attention to how bizarre ordinary dreams are compared to lucid dreams and how this affects the factors of consciousness.
Dream practitioners may think that bizarreness is one of the triggers of lucid dreams and, accordingly, is more common in this form of sleep. The Chinese scientists, however, have come to the conclusion that the opposite is in fact true.
Dreams are usually characterized by a lack of metacognition, that is, the ability of the dreamer to analyze their thinking and therefore self-reflect within the dream. Primitive consciousness in normal sleep turns off many of the brain’s cognitive functions, and therefore makes us unable to cope with cognitive anomalies, such as bizarre dream scenarios, which to some extent resemble a model of psychosis. Lucid dreamers, on the other hand, retain the functions of a higher order of consciousness.
On this basis, the scientists collected descriptions of dreams from 176 survey participants who had a high frequency of lucid dreams, and compared the concentration of bizarreness in lucid and non-lucid dreams on a special scale. The self-reflection indicators of the participants were also assessed.
The study found that levels of strangeness were significantly higher in reports of non-lucid dreams, thus confirming the scientists’ hypothesis about the effect reduced self-reflexivity in sleep would have on the bizarreness of dreams. In other words, the bizarreness of dreams is most likely not the cause of lucid dreams, but the result of changes in the level of metacognition provoked by this state.
The study was published in January 2020 in the scientific magazine Frontiers in Psychology.
