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Sensory and Social Deprivation During a 3-day Dark Retreat

Poster Session D - Monday, March 9, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Daniel Morris¹ (), Avery Bedows², S. Gabriela Torres-Platas¹, Karen Konkoly¹, Scott Berman³, Nicco Reggente², Ken Paller¹; ¹Northwestern University, ²Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, ³Sky Cave Dark Retreat Center

Dark retreat is an ancient contemplative practice in which practitioners enter complete darkness with reduced sensory stimulation for extended periods, with the goal of gaining spiritual insight through intensive exploration of first-person experience. In Tibetan Buddhist traditions, for example, retreats can last for up to 49 days and aim to catalyze profound inner transformation. Contemporary versions of dark retreat that can be experienced without much contemplative training have recently gained some popularity, typically with a reduced duration of 3-7 days. Such experiences may have potential value for promoting psychological benefits. For example, a treatment known as dark therapy, with 14 hours of darkness each day, was developed for patients with bipolar disorder. However, the phenomenological and neurophysiological effects of dark retreats remain under-researched, and there is little documented evidence on changes in wakefulness, sleep, and dreaming. This study aims to examine sleep architecture and dreaming during 3-day dark retreats in 10 participants. We will compare retreat data with baseline measurements as part of a broader collaboration investigating neural and psychological effects of darkness immersion. Sleep will be examined using a wearable EEG headband including total sleep time, prevalence of different sleep stages, sleep efficiency, and lucid-dreaming frequency. We predict prominent changes in sleep and circadian rhythms. Additionally, we will assess interoceptive processing by evaluating heartbeat-evoked potentials and phenomenological reports. Findings from this investigation could provide useful insights into how extended periods of darkness influence consciousness and the brain during both wakefulness and sleep, potentially guiding future clinical and contemplative applications.

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