Scientists have found a correlation between sleep duration and lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis, and out-of-body experiences (OBE). People who sleep more than 9 hours a day are more at risk than others, according to the Phase Research Center. The article, authored by Russian researchers Michael Raduga, Oleg Kuyava, and Natalia Sevcenko, was published in November 2020 in the Medical Hypotheses journal.
In a survey conducted on the streets of Moscow, nearly 1,000 passers-by answered questions about their experiences of phase states such as lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis, OBE, and false awakenings.
The results showed that 88% of the participants had experienced one of these phenomena at least once. Moreover, 43% of respondents said they experience one or more of these states regularly. 71% of the participants reported having experienced at least one lucid dream, while 24% experienced sleep paralysis, 45% – a false awakening episode, and 48% – an OBE. All these states were, therefore, found to be interrelated. In other words, if a person often found him/herself experiencing sleep paralysis, then he/she was more likely than average to have lucid dreams as well.
The researchers also noted that the positive experience of phase states was directly related to the participants’ sleep duration. Thus, respondents who slept less than 6 or more than 9 hours a day were more likely to experience sleep paralysis and other phase phenomena. And with every extra or lost hour of sleep, this probability increased. At the same time, younger people were more likely to experience lucid dreams than respondents over 60 years old. It is also worth noting that this is the first academic publication employing the term “phase”, even though the term itself has been used by practitioners of lucid dreaming and OBE since 2004.
