All varieties of dreaming remain a mystery. Lucid dreams in particular, or those characterized by awareness of the dream, are notoriously difficult to study. Their scarce prevalence and resistance to deliberate induction make it difficult to obtain a sizeable corpus of lucid dream reports. The consequent lack of clarity around lucid dream phenomenology has left the many purported applications...
Neuroscientific investigations of human dreaming have been hampered by reliance on dream recall after awakening. For example, a challenge of associating EEG features with post-waking dream reports is that they are subject to distortion, forgetting, and poor temporal precision. In this study, we used real-time reporting to investigate whether one of the most robust features of the waking visual...
Magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) studies of dreaming are an essential paradigm in the investigation of neurocognitive processes of human consciousness during sleep, but they are limited by the number of observations that can be collected per study. Dream research also involves substantial methodological and conceptual variability, which poses problems for the integration of results. To...
Nightmares are a common symptom in narcolepsy that has not been targeted in prior clinical trials. This study investigated the efficacy of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Nightmares (CBT-N), adapted for narcolepsy, in a small group of adults. Given the high prevalence of lucid dreaming in narcolepsy, we added a promising adjuvant component, targeted lucidity reactivation (TLR), a procedure...
Dreaming is a fundamental but not fully understood part of human experience. Traditional dream content analysis practices, while popular and aided by over 130 unique scales and rating systems, have limitations. Often based on retrospective surveys or lab studies, and sometimes on in-home dream reports collected over some days, they struggle to be applied on a large scale or to show the...
Dreams have long captivated human curiosity, but empirical research in this area has faced significant methodological challenges. Recent interdisciplinary advances have now opened up new opportunities for studying dreams. This review synthesizes these advances into three methodological frameworks and describes how they overcome historical barriers in dream research. First, with observable...
The ability to realize that you're dreaming - lucid dreaming - has value for personal goals and for consciousness research. One route to lucid dreaming is to first undergo pre-sleep training with sensory cues and then receive those cues during REM sleep. This method, Targeted Lucidity Reactivation (TLR), does not demand extensive personal effort but generally requires concurrent polysomnography...
Recurrent nightmares affect up to 8% of the general population and over 50% of those with a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis [1]. Despite known associations between nightmares and negative mental health outcomes [2], little is known concerning how nightmares relate to physical health outcomes. Disruptions to sleep micro- and macro-architecture in frequent nightmare recallers [3]...
People typically become aware that a dream was “just a dream” only after awakening. Alternatively, people can become aware that they are dreaming during the dream. These lucid dreams are thought to involve increased prefrontal cortex activity relative to non-lucid dreams, and they are associated with volitional control over dream content. Lucid dreams could be valuable for many purposes, such...
Dreaming is a fundamental but not fully understood part of human experience that can shed light on our thought patterns. Traditional dream analysis practices, while popular and aided by over 130 unique scales and rating systems, have limitations. Mostly based on retrospective surveys or lab studies, they struggle to be applied on a large scale or to show the importance and connections between...
Standard treatments for nightmares focus on waking activities, with consequences for subsequent sleep. An alternative strategy may be to provide people with a novel way to learn to end a nightmare by waking up. People typically think of sleep as a state that they cannot control, but there are exceptions to this rule. For example, the ability to select dream content in a lucid dream might allow...
Magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) studies of dreaming are an essential paradigm in the investigation of neurocognitive processes of human consciousness during sleep, but they are limited by the number of observations that can be collected per study. Dream research also involves substantial methodological and conceptual variability, which poses problems for the integration of results. To...
Nightmares are a critical component of multidimensional sleep health. Frequent nightmare recallers suffer reduced sleep length, depressed mood, and are more likely to be diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder in the future. Reliable population estimates of nightmare frequency are difficult to obtain and often restricted to rigid timepoints (e.g., once per year). Thus, there is a need for...
The flow of thought is persistent, and at times merciless. Mental content is generated throughout the day and into the night, moving forward predictably at times but surprisingly at others. Understanding what influences the trajectory of thought—how thoughts continuously unfold over time—has important implications for the diagnosis and treatment of thought disorders like schizophrenia and...
Therapies focused on lucid dreaming could be useful for treating various sleep disorders and other conditions. Still, one major roadblock is the paucity of systematic information on the consequences of attempting these sorts of dreams. The current study sought to quantify positive and negative aspects of seeking lucid dreams, describe their phenomenology in detail, and identify features...
Therapies focused on lucid dreaming could be useful for treating various sleep disorders and other conditions. Still, one major roadblock is the paucity of systematic information on the consequences of attempting these sorts of dreams. The current study sought to quantify positive and negative aspects of seeking lucid dreams, describe their phenomenology in detail, and identify features...
Dream lucidity, or being aware that one is dreaming while dreaming, is not an all-or-none phenomenon. Often, subjects report being some variant of “a little lucid” as opposed to completely or not at all. As recent neuroimaging work begins to elucidate the neural underpinnings of lucid experience, understanding subtle phenomenological variation within lucid dreams is essential. Here, we focus on...
Dreams take us to a different reality, a hallucinatory world that feels as real as any waking experience. These often-bizarre episodes are emblematic of human sleep but have yet to be adequately explained. Retrospective dream reports are subject to distortion and forgetting, presenting a fundamental challenge for neuroscientific studies of dreaming. Here we show that individuals who are asleep...
While material from waking life is often represented in dreams, it is less clear whether and how dreams impact waking life in return. Here, we assessed whether dream mood and content from home diaries predict subsequent waking mood using both subjective self-report and an objective automated word detection approach. Subjective ratings of dream and morning mood were highly correlated within...
Lucid dreaming is a unique phenomenon with potential applications for therapeutic interventions. Few studies have investigated the effects of lucidity on an individual's waking mood, which could have valuable implications for improving psychological wellbeing. The current experiment aims to investigate whether the experience of lucidity enhances positive waking mood, and whether lucidity is...
Lucid dreams often coincide with having control over dream events in real-time, although the limitations of dream control are not completely understood. The current study probed the ability of lucid dreamers to reinstate waking scene memories while dreaming. After brief exposure to an experimental scene, participants were asked to reinstate the scene while lucid dreaming (i.e., change dream...
Lucid dreaming (being aware that one is dreaming) is typically a positive experience that may enhance positive mood even after waking. There is concern, however, that lucid dreaming may interfere with sleep quality. In the current experiment, participants practiced common lucid dream induction techniques over the course of a week, and kept a daily sleep and dream diary. The study objective was...
Previous experiments combining cognitive techniques and sleep disruption have been relatively successful in inducing at-home lucid dreams over training periods of 1-week or more.Here, we induce lucid dreams in a single laboratory nap session by pairing cognitive training with external stimulation.Participants came to the laboratory at 7:30 am or 11:00 am and during polysomnography setup were...
During lucid moments of a dream, the sleeper is aware of the dream as it is occurring, and as a result can often perform predetermined actions within the dream. This provides a unique opportunity for dream research, as lucid dreamers can send real-time signals from sleep to the external world. Historically, such sleep-to-wake communication from a lucid dream is executed via left-right eye...
Abstract Dreaming is a fundamental but not fully understood part of human experience. Traditional dream content analysis practices, while popular and aided by over 130 unique scales and rating systems, have limitations. Often based on retrospective surveys or lab studies, and sometimes on in-home dream reports collected over some days, they struggle to be applied on a large scale or to show the...