Gamers More Likely to Become Nightmare Masters

Tom Goldman

Crying on the inside.
Aug 17, 2009
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Gamers More Likely to Become Nightmare Masters



Playing videogames could enable people to better control the worlds of their nightmares.

It might not be smart to eat before bed, but it could be a great idea to play World of Warcraft for a couple hours. LiveScience [http://www.livescience.com/culture/video-games-control-dreams-100525.html] reports that controlling a game environment may translate over to controlling dreams.

Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada, points out that both dreams and videogames are representations of alternate realities, albeit one is driven by biology and the other by technology. She believes that gaming is like "practice" for the ability to have a lucid dream, the term used to describe a dream where the dreamer has control.

Gackenbach was at one time a lucid dream researcher, but started to notice videogames when her son wouldn't stop kissing a Nintendo console after she bought him one. While looking at both lucid dreamers and gamers, she found that they have similarities such as better spacial skills and a high level of focus. These circumstantial parallels inspired her to study the dreams of both non-gamers and hardcore gamers.

Early research suggested that gamers were likely to report lucid dreams. A second study found that these gamers may have had lucid control, but only over themselves. Gackenbach constantly refined her research techniques to find more definitive proof of a connection between gaming and dream control. The results of a study in 2008 showed that gamers had less nightmares than non-gamers, and sometimes reversed roles in their nightmares to become threats themselves. It's just as if a nightmare began with a cinematic of being chased by an ogre, but ended with a gamer blowing the ogre's head off with a rocket launcher.

Gackenbach says of gamers in dreams: "They don't run away, they turn and fight back. They're more aggressive than the norms." She also deduced that gamers have less aggression in dreams, but when it arises it's extreme. "If you look at the actual overall amount of aggression, gamers have less aggression in dreams, but when they're aggressive, oh boy, they go off the top," she revealed.

These kinds of results are being looked at for new medical techniques such as the relief of post-traumatic stress disorder in soldiers returning home from a battlefield. Nightmares are usually a strong component of PTSD, but gaming could possibly help to alleviate their severity or regularity.

Gackenbach will be a featured speaker at the Games for Health Conference in Boston this week, where she'll discuss her dream/gaming research. I've personally known that her findings have been true since the NES-era. Little Nemo the Dream Master [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxnJ7mBrEAk] is just one long lucid dream, after all.


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Woodsey

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Aug 9, 2009
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Interesting.

I've only woken myself up from a nightmare once, though that was when I was 6.
 

Truly-A-Lie

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Nov 14, 2009
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I've never had a lucid dream, though I'm always interested in them. So now I know to have at least two hours a night of dream inducing Uncharted 2. And I'm suddenly wishing I still had the recurring nightmare I had when I was a kid, if only to see myself turn around and kill the *****.
 

Captain Pancake

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May 20, 2009
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Shame it's positive research like this that never makes its way onto national news waves. Though I guess the old saying, "Bad press is good press" still holds true regardless. People would rather hear of the Suicide bomber who killed 20 people than the people who saved 100 more from the same explosion.
 

Jared

The British Paladin
Jul 14, 2009
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I can somewhat a test to this. Ibaleays have dreams but always fwelni havecsome degree of control
 

Danpascooch

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Apr 16, 2009
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And this all comes from Gackenback's experience with traveling through people's dreams?
 

NeutralDrow

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Mar 23, 2009
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Tom Goldman said:
Gackenbach says of gamers in dreams: "They don't run away, they turn and fight back. They're more aggressive than the norms." She also deduced that gamers have less aggression in dreams, but when it arises it's extreme. "If you look at the actual overall amount of aggression, gamers have less aggression in dreams, but when they're aggressive, oh boy, they go off the top," she revealed.
Well, that certainly would explain that dream I had back in high school where I saved my school from a giant monster by casting the Giga Slave...

It's a shame I remember so few of my dreams these days, it seems.
 

AngryMongoose

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Jan 18, 2010
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This is pretty cool, but when Fox get ahold of it it will turn to "Scientist finds games make peoples subconscious extreme and "over the top" with regards to violence."
 

Gildan Bladeborn

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Aug 11, 2009
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Tom Goldman said:
Gackenbach was at one time a lucid dream researcher, but started to notice videogames when her son wouldn't stop kissing a Nintendo console after she bought him one.
Is that really supposed to read "kissing"? If so, that seems like a weird and unrelated factoid to share.
 
Nov 7, 2009
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I rarely have control over my dreams, but in recent times, with more heavy game intake and the furriness, I've found myself not being scared by anything in my dreams. They're never...nightmares, exactly. They're just always surreal.
 

2fish

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Sep 10, 2008
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I did that last night! I had some dream about my house and three people attacking it. I had control I gave orders to the other people in the house (NPCs?). Knives followed real world rules guns follwed video game rules it was wierd. But I won :)

-2fish
 

Darth Caelum

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Jan 21, 2010
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Well that's interesting. Now that i think about it, i haven't had a nightmare in months.
Videogames FTW indeed.
 

Johnnyallstar

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Feb 22, 2009
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Maybe by playing video games we do have more control over our dreams, but it probably also means that exposing ourselves to the wide world of video games will only add to the weird crazy crap that we dream.