I examine more closely the question of whether and how we can voluntarily access and benefit from accessing group mind content. I argue that some of the experiences on serotonergic psychedelics can be seen in terms of unstructured access to a variety of group minds. The ego dissolution experience on psychedelics can be viwed in terms of fusion between the individual and some salient group mind.
.I study what is known about the extent to which group minds shape the content of dreams and suggest we can interact consciously with some group minds during the lucid dreaming state. Typical dreams are thoroughly social, typically depicting dreamer interactions with characters that represent the group minds he/she is a member of.
Dreams have always contributed to religious consciousness and religions have always, in turn, shaped dream content (McNamara, 2016; Lanternari, 1975). Many religions began as literally a dream or vision in the mind of the founder. In the holy scriptures of the three Abrahamic Faiths dreams abound, with perhaps the dream called “Jacob’s ladder” being one of the most famous. The patriarch Jacob...
Introduction: The daily effects of supernatural-agent (SA) concepts on spirituality remain poorly understood. In this study, we focused on dreaming as an avenue to study the effect of SA concepts on spirituality. This work contributes to a long history of research linking together dreaming and spirituality by utilizing quantitative and longitudinal methods. Methods: We conducted an intensive...
Researchers have established that dreams are intensely social and populated by diverse characters, including important figures from the dreamer's daily life. This study examines the types of characters that appeared in participant dreams over two weeks. We found that the majority of dreams include strangers in addition to known individuals, and that personality measures impact the likelihood of...
Some dissociative experiences may be related, in part, to REM intrusion into waking consciousness. If so, some aspects of dream content may be associated with daytime dissociative experiences. We tested the hypothesis that some types of dream content would predict daytime dissociative symptomology. As part of a longitudinal study of the impact of dreams on everyday behavior we administered a...
Abstract The authors review the evidence for overlap in neurophysiologic, cognitive, and phenomenological features of REM sleep dreams and the psychedelic state. REM sleep and dreams contribute in complex ways to the phenomenology of both religious experiences and psychedelic experiences via intrusion of components of REM neurophysiology into waking consciousness or the psychedelic state. The...
We review and synthesize recent religion and brain studies and find that at a broad network neuroscience level, religious/spiritual experiences (RSEs) appear to depend crucially upon interactions between the default mode network (DMN), the frontoparietal network (FPN), and the salience network (SN). We see this general result as broadly consistent with Menon's et al. "Triple Network or...
Grafman and colleagues' papers in religion and brain research have documented the extent to which religious beliefs and behaviors are mediated by standard social cognitive networks in brain. Grafman's work however also points beyond treatments of religious cognition as merely a species of more general social cognitive processes. Data emerging from experiments targeting mystical states as well...
It is not possible to understand dreams unless we become familiar with the whole terrain of dreams. We have discussed ordinary run-of-the-mill dreams that are associated with both REM and NREM sleep states. But there is a very large variety of dream types reported by people. To build an adequate understanding of dreams and a testable theory of dreams, we therefore need to marshal all of the...
In chapter 6 we review recent work on psychedelics on brain function and on religious experiences. 5HT2A receptor signaling systems are covered as is the empirical evidence that transformative effects of psychdelics are linked to ego-dissolution and encounters with superntural agents during the experience.
Study objectives: To test and extend Levin & Nielsen's (2007) Affective Network Dysfunction (AND) model with nightmare disorder (ND) image characteristics, and then to implement the extension as a computational simulation, the Disturbed Dreaming Model (DDM). Methods: We used AnyLogic V7.2 to computationally implement an extended AND model incorporating quantitative effects of image...
REM dreams and NREM dreams differ in terms of content and phenomenologies, these two dream types do not exhaust dream phenomenology. Relative to REM dreams, NREM dreams tend to be less story-like, bizarre, and contain fewer aggressive social interactions and greater numbers of friendly interactions, at least where the dreamer-initiated interactions are concerned.
We developed a dream content analysis system (DCAS) based on an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that was trained using a relatively large corpus of over 35,000 dreams. This sample of dreams were supplied by 424 female and 211 male users over 4 years who had posted them at the dream posting website and app Dreamboard.com. Building upon previous dream content ontologies developed by Hall,...
A standout resource on the emerging field of applying neuropsychology and the latest findings in sleep and dream research to religious experience, this book investigates the proven biological links between REM dreams and religious ideas, covering past and current schools of thought in both the science of dreams and the science of religion. Across time and around the world, billions of people...
We present a theory of the creativity of dreams as well as psychopathology of religious delusions with respect to production of fundamental forms of religious cognition-specifically supernatural agent (SA) cognitions. We suggest that dream cognitions are particularly efficient at producing highly memorable and impactful experiences with SAs because dreams involve three processes that are...
This two-volume text reviews spirit possession throughout history, analyzes case studies from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, and examines rites for exorcism. From the beginning of civilization to the present day, and across all major religions and cultures, there have been documented cases of people seemingly overtaken by an unseen entity. The invading force—whether good or bad—appears...
We review the literature on the neurobiology of rapid eye movement (REM) and non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep states and associated dreams. REM is associated with enhanced activation of limbic and amygdalar networks and decreased activation in dorsal prefrontal regions while stage II NREM is associated with greater cortical activation than REM. Not surprisingly, these disparate brain...
Technical advances in the life and medical sciences have revolutionised our understanding of the brain, while the emerging disciplines of social, cognitive, and affective neuroscience continue to reveal the connections of the higher cognitive functions and emotional states associated with religious experience to underlying brain states. At the same time, a host of developing theories in...
Introduction: We tested the hypothesis that REM sleep contributes to core features of cognitive dysfunction of anxious depression including negative self-appraisals, biased memory processing and unpleasant dream content. Methods: After a habituation night in a sleep lab, a convenience sample of 35 healthy college students and 20 depressed/anxious students were awakened 10 min into a REM sleep...
The authors hypothesized that representations of the Self (or the dreamer) in dreams would change systematically, from a prereflective form of Self to more complex forms, as a function of both age and sleep state (REM vs. non-REM). These hypotheses were partially confirmed. While the authors found that all the self-concept-related dream content indexes derived from the Hall/Van de Castle dream...
The function of REM sleep dreaming is still unknown. We situate our approach to understanding dream phenomenology and dream function within that part of evolutionary theory known as Costly Signaling Theory (CST). We contend that many of the signals produced by the dreaming brain can be and should be construed as “costly signals”—emotions or mental simulations that produce daytime behavioral...
We tested the hypothesis (McNamara 1996; Zborowski and McNamara 1998) that dream recall and dream content would pattern with interpersonal attachment styles. In study I, college student volunteers were assessed on measures of attachment, dream recall, dream content and other psychologic measures. Results showed that participants who were classified as ‘high’ on an ‘insecure attachment’ scale...