Brain Sciences
March 16, 2026
Daniel J Morris, Susana Gabriela Torres-Platas, Karen R Konkoly et al.
1 citation
BACKGROUND/OBJECTIVES: Lucid dreaming-dreaming with the awareness that one is dreaming-has been explored from many perspectives, including those of cognitive neuroscience and various ancient cultural traditions. Lucid dreaming appears within the Tibetan-Buddhist literature together with dream yoga, a set of contemplative practices aimed at cultivating lucidity during dreams along with other...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Karen R Konkoly, Daniel J Morris, Kaitlyn Hurka et al.
Dreams have arguably been a source of creative insight for millennia. The specific assertion that dreams during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep promote creative problem-solving, however, has only anecdotal support, lacking strong empirical support from rigorous studies. Experimental manipulations of dream content have been confounded by waking components, such that any boost in creative...
Neuropsychologia
October 10, 2025
Karen R Konkoly, Daniel J Morris, Matthew Cho et al.
Dreams may partially reflect the memory reorganizing that occurs nightly, improving the usefulness of what we learn each day. However, solid evidence has yet to link dreaming with adaptive overnight memory reorganization. Establishing this link faces several challenges, including the difficulty of experimentally controlling dream content and the susceptibility of dream reports to distortion and...
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...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2025
Daniel J Morris, D Blaise Elliott, Susana Gabriela Torres-Platas et al.
3 citations
The immersive environments of virtual reality (VR) have potential to engender a vast range of experiences. Although participants recognize these experiences as artificial, the consequences can still be profound. Compared to VR, lucid dreams-characterized by awareness that one is dreaming-potentially allow for even more expansive explorations of immersive multisensory experience. Furthermore,...
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...
Open MIND
May 28, 2024
Susana G. Torres‐platas, Daniel J Morris, Michael R. Sheehy et al.
AIMS: (1) Test whether dreaming holds a key to understanding assumptions that tacitly constrain our waking lives. (2) Quantify effects of Dream-Yoga-inspired procedures for exploring and surmounting constraints of the perception box. BACKGROUND: People spend a third of their lives asleep, usually oblivious to the opportunities for enhanced well-being that sleep offers. Over centuries,...
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...
Sleep
April 12, 2023
Claudia Picard-Deland, Karen R Konkoly, Rachel Raider et al.
Memories of waking-life events are incorporated into dreams, but their incorporation is not uniform across a night of sleep. This study aimed to elucidate ways in which such memory sources vary by sleep stage and time of night. Twenty healthy participants (11 F; 24.1 ± 5.7 years) spent a night in the laboratory and were awakened for dream collection approximately 12 times spread across early,...
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...
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...