Sleep
September 1, 2009
Ursula Voss, R. Holzmann, Inka Tuin et al.
443 citations
Lucid dreaming combines hallucinatory dream activity with wake-like reflective awareness and control. Electrophysiological recordings from six trained student volunteers show that lucid dreaming shares REM-like power in delta and theta frequency bands but exhibits higher-than-REM activity in the gamma band, peaking around 40 Hz, especially in frontal and frontolateral regions. Overall brain coherence during lucid dreaming resembles waking levels and is significantly higher than in REM sleep across the analyzed spectrum; waking shows high alpha coherence, while lucid dreaming shows increased delta and theta coherence, largest in frontolateral and frontal areas. These findings suggest lucid dreaming is a hybrid state of consciousness with measurable physiological differences from both waking and REM sleep.
Journal of Sleep Research
May 29, 2012
Ursula Voss, Clemens Frenzel, Judith Koppehele-Gossel et al.
76 citations
Lucid dreaming is common in young children, with its incidence dropping around age 16. A survey of students aged 6-19 found that those in higher-level schools reported more lucid dreams than those in lower-level schools. The authors propose a link between the natural occurrence of lucid dreaming and brain maturation, considering methodological issues.
Frontiers in Psychology
November 12, 2018
Ursula Voss, Armando D’Agostino, Luca Kolibius et al.
28 citations
Dreams and psychosis share overlapping features in symptoms and brain activity, offering a testable model for conditions like schizophrenia and delirium. This review examines two key concepts: insight and dissociation. Insight in dreams is central to lucid dreaming, where dreamers become aware they are dreaming and often try to control the narrative, alongside dissociative experiences similar to depersonalization and derealization. These concepts also apply to psychotic illness. While insight may be harmless in lucid dreaming and even beneficial in psychosis, dissociation remains poorly understood. Comparing these phenomena helps clarify their psychological and neurophysiological roles.
January 1, 2015
Ursula Voss, Allan Hobson
27 citations
Lucid dreaming is the conscious awareness of dreaming while still in a dream state. This review examines evidence that lucid dreaming is a real phenomenon, including its occurrence, underlying mechanisms, and scientific value. Four hypotheses are presented: the Brain Maturation Hypothesis links brain development to lucid dream frequency in children and adults, suggesting spontaneous lucid dreams result from accidental frontal cortex activation during REM sleep. The Hybrid State Hypothesis and Space of Consciousness Model describe a wake-like EEG pattern in frontal brain areas alongside REM sleep-like EEG in posterior regions. The Gamma Band Hypothesis proposes that gamma oscillatory activity, which accompanies conscious awareness while awake, also promotes awareness in dreams. Experimental evidence suggests lower gamma band activity is necessary for conscious awareness in dreams.
International journal of clinical and health psychology : IJCHP
January 1, 2023
Judith Koppehele-Gossel, Lena-Marie Weinmann, Ansgar Klimke et al.
5 citations
During the COVID-19 pandemic, pandemic-related themes were incorporated into dreams, but such incorporation was rare. Psychiatric outpatients and healthy controls did not differ in how often their dreams included pandemic content, and incorporation was unrelated to psychiatric symptoms or loneliness. Loneliness was, however, linked to threat-related dream content, suggesting it is a risk factor for bad dreams but not for crisis-specific incorporation. Lucid dreaming core dimensions—insight, control, and dissociation—were similar between outpatients and controls during lockdowns. Compared to a pre-pandemic sample, scores for control and dissociation were lower, while insight was not. The authors propose that REM sleep intensified during lockdowns for emotional consolidation, making the mental state less hybrid and thus less lucid.
Oxford Handbooks Online
April 5, 2018
Jennifer Windt, Ursula Voss
Lucid dreaming, often seen as a counterexample to the spontaneous nature of dreams because it involves deliberate control, is actually a valuable model for studying spontaneous thought. The chapter argues that lucid insight and control can arise from spontaneous cognitive processes, not just conscious reasoning, and that investigating dream lucidity can clarify how metacognitive awareness interacts with the spontaneous, imagistic thinking that generates dream content. This raises new questions about the relationship between metacognition and spontaneity.
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2013
Jana Speth, Clemens Frenzel, Ursula Voss
Dream reports collected after REM sleep describe more physical movement by the dreamer, while hypnagogic hallucinations (the imagery experienced just before falling asleep) are mostly experienced passively, as an observer. The findings come from linguistic analysis of reports given immediately after EEG-monitored periods of hypnagogia and REM sleep in a sleep laboratory. The method, called Activity Analysis, quantifies the level of simulated motor activity in subjective reports. This approach could be used to study altered activity levels in conditions such as depression or PTSD.
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2013
Ursula Voss, Karin Schermelleh-Engel, Jennifer Windt et al.
A new scale, the Lucidity and Consciousness in Dreams scale (LuCiD), distinguishes lucid from non-lucid dreams using eight factors: INSIGHT, CONTROL, THOUGHT, REALISM, MEMORY, DISSOCIATION, NEGATIVE EMOTION, and POSITIVE EMOTION. While all factors relate to dream consciousness, realism and negative emotion do not differ between lucid and non-lucid dreams, indicating that lucid insight is separate from dream bizarreness or changes in subjective realism. The scale was developed through exploratory factor analysis on data from a first survey and validated with confirmatory factor analysis on a second survey.
Advances in Consciousness Research
October 28, 2010
Allan Hobson, Ursula Voss
Consciousness in primates and humans has at least two expressions that depend on the state of the organism: waking and dreaming. In waking, consciousness allows volition and reflection (secondary consciousness), whereas dreaming is a state of primary consciousness characterized by delusional thoughts, though both states involve perception and emotion. Lucid dreaming is a rare, real condition that combines elements of both waking and dreaming, involving primary and secondary consciousness, and offers a promising tool for studying the neural basis of consciousness.