The present study examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the emotional quality of dreams, the incorporation of pandemic-related themes, and the occurrence of lucid dreaming. Dream reports and lucidity ratings of psychiatric outpatients (n = 30) and healthy controls (n = 81) during two lockdowns in Germany were compared to those of healthy controls (n = 33) before the pandemic. Results...
Dreams and psychosis share several important features regarding symptoms and underlying neurobiology, which is helpful in constructing a testable model of, for example, schizophrenia and delirium. The purpose of the present communication is to discuss two major concepts in dreaming and psychosis that have received much attention in the recent literature: insight and dissociation. Both phenomena...
REM sleep is a state of desynchronized electrophysiological activity of the brain. It is usually accompanied by mental activity characterized by a succession of complex visual experiences commonly referred to as dreaming. Although REM sleep and dreaming are not implicitly conjoined, when they co-occur, they have a very distinct phenomenology, as, typically, the dream plot is bizarre and...
Dreams are sometimes described as an intensified form of spontaneous waking thought. Lucid dreams may seem to be a counterexample, because metacognitive insight into the fact that one is now dreaming is often associated with the ability to deliberately control the ongoing dream. This chapter uses conceptual considerations and empirical research findings to argue that lucid dreaming is in fact a...
Dreams are usually centered around a dream self capable of tasks generally impossible in waking, e.g. flying or walking through walls. Moreover, the bodily dream self appears relatively stable and insensitive to changes of the embodied wake self, raising the question of whether and to what extent the dream self is embodied. To further explore its determinants, we tested whether the dream self...
Lucid dreaming may be defined as the conscious awareness that one is dreaming while dreaming. Instead of incorrectly assuming that one is awake, the dreamer gains insight about her or his real state of consciousness. Lucid dreaming is rare and evanescent, which probably accounts for lingering doubts about its veracity and for its marginalization in science. The purpose of this paper is to...
Recent findings link fronto-temporal gamma electroencephalographic (EEG) activity to conscious awareness in dreams, but a causal relationship has not yet been established. We found that current stimulation in the lower gamma band during REM sleep influences ongoing brain activity and induces self-reflective awareness in dreams. Other stimulation frequencies were not effective, suggesting that...
We present Activity Analysis as a new method for the quantification of subjective reports of altered states of consciousness with regard to the indicated level of simulated motor activity. Empirical linguistic activity analysis was conducted with dream reports conceived immediately after EEG-controlled periods of hypnagogic hallucinations and REM-sleep in the sleep laboratory. Reports of...
In this article, we present results from an interdisciplinary research project aimed at assessing consciousness in dreams. For this purpose, we compared lucid dreams with normal non-lucid dreams from REM sleep. Both lucid and non-lucid dreams are an important contrast condition for theories of waking consciousness, giving valuable insights into the structure of conscious experience and its...
The current study focused on the distribution of lucid dreams in school children and young adults. The survey was conducted on a large sample of students aged 6-19 years. Questions distinguished between past and current experience with lucid dreams. Results suggest that lucid dreaming is quite pronounced in young children, its incidence rate drops at about age 16 years. Increased lucidity was...
Dreaming and waking are two brain-mind states, which are characterized by shared and differentiated properties at the levels of brain and consciousness. As part of our effort to capitalize on a comparison of these two states we have applied Edelman's distinction between primary and secondary consciousness, which we link to dreaming and waking respectively. In this paper we examine the...
Models of dream analysis either assume a continuum of waking and dreaming or the existence of two dissociated realities. Both approaches rely on different methodology. Whereas continuity models are based on content analysis, discontinuity models use a structural approach. In our study, we applied both methods to test specific hypotheses about continuity or discontinuity. We contrasted dream...
In this essay, we develop our working hypothesis that consciousness in primates and humans is a state-dependent commodity that has at least two expressions. Waking and dreaming are two such states that differ in conscious awareness. In both states, we are perceptive and emotional. Whereas in dreaming, our thoughts are delusional, however, waking consciousness potentiates volition and...
STUDY OBJECTIVES: The goal of the study was to seek physiological correlates of lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is a dissociated state with aspects of waking and dreaming combined in a way so as to suggest a specific alteration in brain physiology for which we now present preliminary but intriguing evidence. We show that the unusual combination of hallucinatory dream activity and wake-like...