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The gamer dream experience of high aggression levels matched with little or no fear inspired Gackenbach to pursue a new study with Athabasca University in Canada. "But when they're aggressive, oh boy, they go off the top." "If you look at the actual overall amount of aggression, gamers have less aggression in dreams," Gackenbach said. Levels of aggression in gamer dreams also included hyper-violence not unlike that of an R-rated movie, as opposed to a non-gamer PG-13 dream. "They don't run away, they turn and fight back. "What happens with gamers is that something inexplicable happens," Gackenbach explained. In other words, a scary nightmare scenario turned into something "fun" for a gamer. She found that gamers experienced less or even reversed threat simulation (in which the dreamer became the threatening presence), with fewer aggression dreams overall. To test that theory, Gackenbach conducted a 2008 study with 35 males and 63 females, and used independent assessments that coded threat levels in after-dream reports. Such nightmares would help organisms hone their avoidance skills in a protective environment, and ideally prepare organisms for a real-life situation. Revonsuo suggested that dreams might mimic threatening situations from real life, except in the safe environment of dream world. But Gackenbach also wondered if video games affected nightmares, based on the "threat simulation" theory proposed by Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo. Gackenbach eventually replicated her findings about lucid dreaming and video games several times with college students as subjects, and refined her methods by controlling for factors such as frequency of recalling dreams.įinding awareness and some level of control in gamer dreams was one thing. "That's open to all kinds of bias, certain memory biases, self-reported biases." "The first time we simply asked people how often they had lucid dreams, looking back over their life and making judgment calls," Gackenbach told LiveScience. The gamers also frequently flipped between a first person view from within the body and a third person view of themselves from outside, except never with the calm detachment of a distant witness. It found that lucid dreams were common, but that the gamers never had dream control over anything beyond their dream selves. The first study suggested that people who frequently played video games were more likely to report lucid dreams, observer dreams where they viewed themselves from outside their bodies, and dream control that allowed people to actively influence or change their dream worlds – qualities suggestive of watching or controlling the action of a video-game character.Ī second study tried to narrow down the uncertainties by examining dreams that participants experienced from the night before, and focused more on gamers. She had prepared by conducting larger surveys in-class and online to get a sense of where to focus questions. That encouraged Gackenbach to survey the dreams of both non-gamers and hardcore gamers, beginning with two studies published in 2006. The two groups have also demonstrated a high level of focus or concentration, whether honed through lucidity-training activities, such as meditation, or through hours spent fighting virtual enemies to reach the next level in a game. Both lucid dreamers and gamers seemed to have better spatial skills and were less prone to motion sickness. Several intriguing parallels between lucid dreams and video games first emerged when Gackenbach examined past research on games. She is scheduled to discuss her work as a featured speaker at the Sixth Annual Games for Health Conference in Boston this week.
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The last decade of game-related research has since yielded several surprises, although the findings represent suggestive associations rather than definitive proof, Gackenbach cautioned.