This thesis asks how we become aware of the nature of our current experience across the sleep-wake cycle. In sleep, we might sometimes realize that we are dreaming. In wakefulness, our awareness of our current state can fade as our attention drifts or our mind goes blank. Using detailed interviews alongside sleep-laboratory and task-based experimental protocols, this work shows that awareness...
Abstract To reduce maladaptive behaviors, cognitive-behavioral and mindfulness-based interventions can be engaged during wakefulness. Such strategies may also be engaged during sleep, providing a unique and powerful pathway to positive behavioral change. Here we describe an initial scientific investigation of Dream Yoga, a type of contemplative practice that includes a set of prescribed tasks...
Psychedelic compound N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is renowned for inducing highly immersive experiences, often including encounters with seemingly sentient presences. While such phenomena are well documented, immersion under psychedelics remains conceptually underdefined and phenomenologically underexplored. Here we apply micro-phenomenology to characterize immersion under DMT as a structured...
Ema Demar: It was a late summer after noon in 2014, and I was about to start my first serious attempt at meditation.I closed my eyes.I inhaled, and exhaled.I opened a nonjudgmental (or so I tried) attention to whatever was there.What did I notice?A colorful kaleidoscope of bodily sensations, brief images, half-finished spoken sentences; a series of hasty shifts in my focus; the feeling of the...
Lucid dreaming (LD) – in which dreamers become aware that they are currently dreaming – has gained increasing attention in consciousness studies, yet its fine-grained experiential dynamics remain undercharacterized. We conducted in-depth micro-phenomenological interviews on 22 signal-verified lucid dreams experienced in a controlled sleep-laboratory setting, mapping within-episode dynamics from...
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,...
DMT reliably induces profound experiences of immersion in other worlds and encounters with seemingly autonomous presences, yet the lived qualities and unfolding of these experiences remain poorly understood. Using micro-phenomenological interviews with twenty-three healthy participants who received DMT during fMRI scanning, this study explores how these experiences arise and develop in...
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are characterized by the subjective experience of being located outside the physical body. Little is known about the neurophysiology of spontaneous OBEs, which are often reported by healthy individuals as occurring during states of reduced vigilance, particularly in proximity to or during sleep (sleep-related OBEs). In this paper, we review the current state of...
Lucid dreaming occurs when one is aware of dreaming while asleep. While lucid dreaming can occur spontaneously, it remains rare. This multi-center study (Netherlands, Italy, Canada) tested a combined induction approach integrating senses-initiated lucid dreaming (SSILD) with targeted lucidity reactivation in a large sample of participants with varying lucid dreaming experience. Sixty...
Out-of body experiences (OBEs) are characterized by the subjective experience of being located outside the physical body. Evidence supports that OBEs triggered by electrical stimulation and epileptic seizures are associated with disrupted brain activity in a distributed network centred at the temporo-parietal junction and the resulting multisensory disruption of body representation. However,...
Recent years have seen a heightened focus on the study of minimal forms of awareness during sleep to advance the study of consciousness and understand what makes a state conscious. This focus draws on an increased interest in anecdotical descriptions made by classic Indian philosophical traditions about unusual forms of awareness during sleep. For instance, in the so-called state of...
In this chapter, we present the problem of dream reports in philosophy and empirical research, examine how the variability of methods and measures influences research results, and suggest that research on the phenomenological features of dreaming could benefit from insights from first-person methods in consciousness research. We consider two interview-based methods developed for acquiring...