arXiv (Cornell University)
March 27, 2026
Remington Mallett
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...
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
September 30, 2025
Karen R Konkoly, Saba Al-Youssef, Christopher Y Mazurek et al.
3 citations
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...
Nature Communications
August 13, 2025
William Wong, Rubén Herzog, Kátia Cristine Andrade et al.
10 citations
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...
Journal of Sleep Research
June 1, 2025
Jennifer M Mundt, Kristi E. Pruiksma, Karen R Konkoly et al.
7 citations
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...
EPJ Data Science
May 23, 2025
Anubhab Das, Sanja Šćepanović, Luca Maria Aiello et al.
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...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
December 1, 2024
Remington Mallett, Karen R Konkoly, Tore Nielsen et al.
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...
Consciousness and Cognition
October 1, 2024
Karen R Konkoly, Nathan W Whitmore, Remington Mallett et al.
4 citations
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...
arXiv (Cornell University)
July 9, 2023
Anubhab Das, Sanja Šćepanović, Luca Maria Aiello et al.
1 citation
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...
May 16, 2023
William Wong, Kátia C. Andrade, Thomas Andrillon et al.
21 citations
preprint
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...
March 14, 2023
Remington Mallett, Yasmeen Nahas, Kalina Christoff et al.
2 citations
preprint
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...
Sleep advances : a journal of the Sleep Research Society
2022
Remington Mallett, Laura Sowin, Rachel Raider et al.
22 citations
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...
Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
April 15, 2021
Remington Mallett, Michelle Carr, Martin Freegard et al.
7 citations
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...
Current biology : CB
April 12, 2021
Karen R Konkoly, Kristoffer Appel, Emma Chabani et al.
126 citations
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...
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2020
Abigail Stocks, Michelle Carr, Remington Mallett et al.
33 citations
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...
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2020
Remington Mallett
14 citations
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...
May 27, 2020
Michelle Carr, A. Stocks, Remington Mallett et al.
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...
Anubhab Das, Sanja Šćepanović, Luca Maria Aiello et al.
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...
Remington Mallett
preprint
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...
Remington Mallett, Laura Sowin, Michelle Carr
preprint
Nightmares disrupt sleep health and predict future psychiatric diagnoses, yet reliable population estimates and their fluctuations over time are difficult to obtain. Here, we set out to test if a digital surveillance approach could be used to observe reliable estimates of nightmare frequency and dysphoric dreaming in the general population from social media posts. English-language posts from...