Abstract The language people use to describe their inner experiences arising during sleep and wakefulness provides a window into the mind. Dreams and unguided waking thought, here referred to as mind wandering, are thought to reflect unique individual differences and mental health. Here we use graph theory to analyse a large dataset of dream (n = 1434) and mind wandering (n = 1619) reports from...
Previous studies have examined how the COVID-19 pandemic affected dream recall, dream content, and nightmares. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to the individual and situational factors associated with pandemic-induced changes in dreams. The threat simulation theory of dreaming predicts that threatening situations in our waking life (situational factors) influence...
Psychedelics and meditation can facilitate transformative experiences with acute changes in sensory processing and self-perception, but research about their relation to narrative and affective-attitudinal body image remains limited. We examined body image themes in psychedelic and meditative experience narratives, compared these between experience types, and examined their associations with...
Previous studies have examined how the COVID-19 pandemic affected dream recall, dream content, and nightmares. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to the individual and situational factors associated with pandemic-induced changes in dreams. The threat simulation theory of dreaming predicts that threatening situations in our waking life (situational factors) influence...
Previous research indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected dreaming negatively. We compared 1132 dreams collected with prospective two-week dream diary during the pandemic to 166 dreams collected before the pandemic. We hypothesized that the pandemic would increase the number of threatening events, threats related to diseases, and the severity of threats. We also hypothesized that...
Despite a surge of studies on the effects of COVID-19 on our well-being, we know little about how the pandemic is reflected in people’s spontaneous thoughts and experiences, such as mind-wandering (or daydreaming) during wakefulness and dreaming during sleep. We investigated whether and how COVID-19 related general concern, anxiety, and daily worry are associated with the daily fluctuation of...
Based on the Social Simulation Theory of dreaming (SST), we studied the effects of voluntary social seclusion on dream content and sleep structure. Specifically, we studied the Compensation Hypothesis, which predicts social dream contents to increase during social seclusion, the Sociality Bias - a ratio between dream and wake interactions - and the Strengthening Hypothesis, which predicts an...
Affective experiences occur across the wake-sleep cycle—from active wakefulness to resting wakefulness (i.e., mind-wandering or daydreaming) to sleep (i.e., dreaming). Yet, we know little about the dynamics of affective experiences across these states. Here, we investigated the within-person fluctuations in the prevalence and valence of affect experienced during mind-wandering and night-time...
The aim of this study was to compare the emotional content of dream reports collected at home upon morning awakenings with those collected in the laboratory upon early and late rapid eye movement (REM) sleep awakenings. Eighteen adults (11 women, seven men; mean age = 25.89 ± 4.85) wrote down their home dreams every morning immediately upon awakening during a 7-day period. Participants also...