Gackenbach’s research found that gamers report a greater sense of control in their dreams than non-gamers, as well as more awareness that they are dreaming—what researchers term “lucidity.” This suggested that spending time in a fictional, controllable world might teach gamers to view dream worlds through the same lens.

Her latest research extends the same questions to virtual reality, a technology that has a potentially wider reach than video games, with applications in areas from brain surgery to roller coasters. Manufacturers have leapt to fill the perceived demand, sparking bright-eyed proclamations that 2015—and then 2016—would be the year virtual reality goes mainstream. Following in the footsteps of Facebook’s Oculus Rift, HTC and Sony have also created their own immersive devices.

These gadgets are appealing because they’re temporary: Take off your headset, and you’re back in the real world. But Gackenbach suspects that as with video games, what is thought of as a momentary diversion is actually messing with people’s brains.

Because virtual-reality devices are more physically immersive than ordinary video games, Gackenbach hypothesized that the Oculus Rift would intensify the effect she’d observed. In a study she presented at a conference in June, participants played a 15-minute car-racing game on a computer, then described a dream from the previous night. Half the group donned the Rift to play the game; they remembered those dreams as higher in lucidity than the control group, which did not use the device. This difference disappeared when both groups reported on their dreams again the following week.

“All this points to one thing,” Gackenbach said. “When you alter people’s waking realities, their memory changes. The more you think you’re in one reality, it alters your memory of other realities.”

Could regular forays into virtual reality actually trigger lucid dreams, too? A survey Gackenbach conducted in conjunction with her study finds a correlation between heavy Rift usage and increased dream lucidity. Participants, including both Rift developers and gamers, described having increasingly lucid dreams as they spent more time immersed in virtual reality. “I seem more in control of my dreams now and am somewhat aware that it is a dream,” one technical writer reported.

Many virtual environments have a surreal quality, enabling users to experience activities—deep-sea diving, flying—would be unusual or even impossible in their real lives. Dreams operate in a similar way, leading some researchers to speculate that VR devices might train users to approach any “unreal” situation with heightened awareness. “One of the strategies to increase lucid dreaming frequency is to engage more in dream-related thinking,” says Martin Dresler, a psychologist at Radboud University, in the Netherlands. “So it’s indeed plausible that engagement in dream-like environments—like many virtual-reality programs are—increases lucid dreaming frequency.”