Although the jury's still out on whether playing videogames sharpens your mind or breaks your legs, new research indicates heavy gamers are more likely to be able to control their own dreams.
Sleep
"If you're spending hours a day in a virtual reality, if nothing else it's practice," Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist at Grant MacEwan University in Canada, told LiveScience. "Gamers are used to controlling their game environments, so that can translate into dreams."
Gackenbach found gamers were more likely to have had out-of-body experiences in dreams, and have a greater incidence of "lucid" dreams -- those where the dreamer becomes aware they're dreaming, or can achieve some degree of control over the dream's content and direction. She also found gamers experienced dreams where their viewpoint switched from a first-person view -- through their own eyes -- to a third-person view, as if watched by a remote observer or camera.
Sound familiar? If you're a gamer, it should: many games allow just that sort of perspective shift.
She went on to investigate nightmares and dreams with violent themes, and found that although gamers had fewer nightmares overall, they had a greater incidence of highly aggressive or violent dreams. Some were even able to "fight back" against frightening dreams, turning their nightmares into thrilling, violent, game-like experiences.
The discoveries are preliminary, but Gackenbach hopes they could find practical applications in treating sufferers of recurrent nightmares and post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly among combat veterans.
And according to an unrelated study, you can play them right up until lights-out without fear of sleeplessness. Last month, researchers from Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia published a paper that indicates that playing video games before bedtime has only a mild effect on the time it takes to fall asleep.
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