People who frequently have lucid dreams—awareness of being in a dream—tend to be better at telling the difference between memories of real events and memories of imagined events. In one experiment with 31 college students, higher dream lucidity correlated with better performance on a reality monitoring test. A second experiment with 109 participants found that those with more lucid dreams showed smaller differences in sensory details between memories of perceived and imagined events. These results suggest that frequent lucid dreamers have a superior ability to distinguish external from internal experiences, which may help protect against reality monitoring errors.
People who frequently have lucid dreams—dreams in which they are aware they are dreaming—tend to be more efficient at resolving mental conflicts, but only when their attention has been primed by a warning cue. In a study of 77 participants who rated their dream lucidity over a week and then completed a computerized attention task, a negative correlation emerged between trait lucidity and conflict resolution scores among the 49 participants whose responses were faster after an alerting signal. This suggests that for individuals whose information processing is facilitated by cues, greater lucidity is linked to better conflict resolution.