This chapter provides a detailed explanation for self-knowing (autonoetic) consciousness, based on the Multistate Hierarchical Model of Consciousness. This full statement of the theory makes it possible to explain more fully how autonoetic consciousness differs from dreaming, which is a form of noetic (fact-knowing) consciousness. The relationship between autonoetic consciousness and noetic...
This chapter demonstrates exactly how well the adaptive inactivity theory of sleep explains several unusual features of human sleep, which were not fully known and understood before the publication in 2015 of a longitudinal study of sleep in three indigenous societies without electricity. These indigenous groups sleep on average only 5–7 hours a night, and they sleep longer in the winter than...
This chapter is similar to Chapter 5 in that it provides the first synthesis of the various neurophysiological and neuroimaging findings concerning the nature of the arousal process that leads to the morning awakening. It uses the neuroimaging studies to show that very specific networks lead to the almost instantaneous return of consciousness, but people nonetheless feel groggy and often are...
This chapter provides the most detailed critical analysis yet developed of the neurophysiological theory of dreaming called activation-synthesis theory, a bottom-up theory that rejects a top-down neurocognitive approach because rigorous studies of dream content allegedly cannot be carried out, especially on the basis of dream reports collected in the sleep lab. This theory suggests that dreams...
Chapter 1 highlights the most important and enduring findings from systematic studies of dreaming in sleep laboratories, then discusses their implications. Most importantly, these frequently replicated studies show that dreams are a reasonable simulation of waking life that are only rarely highly unusual or “bizarre” in their structure or content. These studies also show that dreaming happens...
This book presents a new neurocognitive theory of dreams that documents the similarities of dreaming to waking thought, demonstrates that personal psychological meaning can be found in a majority of dream reports, has a strong developmental dimension based on excellent longitudinal and cross-sectional studies carried out in sleep labs with children ages 3–15, locates the neural substrate for...
The fifth chapter presents the evidence for the novel idea that the neural substrate that enables dreaming is based in subsystems within the waking default network. The evidence for this hypothesis includes neuroimaging studies of representative samples of children and adults as well as studies of neurological patients who report they have experienced alterations in their dreaming, or even lost...
Sleep medicine specialists view the problem of chronic nightmare disorder as an independent sleep disorder. When patients seek treatment for chronic nightmares, a direct intervention may be offered regardless of the putative causes. In contrast, sleep medicine does not view nightmares exclusively as a symptomatic feature of a primary disorder, whereas the psychiatric community and its nosology...
Past research shows there are more similarities than differences in the dream content of college students in several industrialized democracies. This study uses new results from dreams collected in Germany to support this past finding and suggest that dreams are more similar than different because they dramatize people's conceptions and concerns in relation to personal issues, which probably do...
Discoveries in three distinct areas of dream research make it possible to suggest the outlines of a new neurocognitive theory of dreaming. The first relevant findings come from assessments of patients with brain injuries, which show that lesions in different areas have differential effects on dreaming and thereby imply the contours of the neural network necessary for dreaming. The second set of...