Frontiers in Sleep
October 12, 2026
Adriana Michalak, Claudia Picard-Deland, Giulio Bernardi et al.
The sleeping brain hosts a spectrum of subjective experiences, ranging from fleeting hypnagogic images and simple thoughts to vivid, full-fledged dreams and lucid dreaming. The works published in this Research Topic present novel methodological and conceptual approaches to studying these experiences. Contributions span the challenges of studying dreaming in clinical populations (Fischmann et...
PsyArXiv
November 17, 2025
Ema Demšar, Mahdad Jafarzadeh Esfahani, Maša Rebernik et al.
preprint
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...
Journal of Sleep Research
October 1, 2025
Claudia Picard-Deland, Matteo Cesari, Ambra Stefani et al.
Parasomnias are abnormal behaviours or mental experiences during sleep or the sleep-wake transition. As disorders of arousal (DOA) or REM sleep behaviour disorder (RBD) can be difficult to capture in the sleep laboratory and may need to be diagnosed in large communities, new home diagnostic devices are being developed, including actigraphy, EEG headbands, as well as 2D infrared and 3D time of...
Frontiers in Psychology
July 1, 2025
Tore Nielsen, Jade Radke, Claudia Picard-Deland et al.
3 citations
Background: d cartoon series-the topic has only rarely been researched. Methods: We asked 1,082 participants to complete an online survey to test specific hypotheses on why people perceive that food affects their dreams, including whether specific foods influence dreams directly (food-specific effects), through physiological symptoms (food distress), or via altered sleep quality (sleep...
arXiv (Cornell University)
February 13, 2025
Pinyao Liu, Keon Ju M. Lee, Alexander Steinmaurer et al.
preprint
We present DreamLLM-3D, a composite multimodal AI system behind an immersive art installation for dream re-experiencing. It enables automated dream content analysis for immersive dream-reliving, by integrating a Large Language Model (LLM) with text-to-3D Generative AI. The LLM processes voiced dream reports to identify key dream entities (characters and objects), social interaction, and dream...
bioRxiv
June 27, 2024
Claudia Picard-Deland, Mahdad Jafarzadeh Esfahani, Leila Anna Christina Salvesen et al.
preprint
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...
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 6, 2023
Claudia Picard-Deland, Giulio Bernardi, Lisa Genzel et al.
2 citations
preprint
Newly encoded memory traces are spontaneously reactivated during sleep. Since their discovery in the 1990s, these memory reactivations have been discussed as a potential neural basis for dream experiences. New results from animal and human research, as well as the rapidly growing field of sleep and dream engineering, provide essential insights into this question, revealing both strong parallels...
Sleep
July 11, 2022
Claudia Picard-Deland, Max-Antoine Allaire, Tore Nielsen
5 citations
Early research suggests that the vestibular system is implicated in lucid dreaming, e.g. frequent lucid dreamers outperform others on static balance tasks. Furthermore, gravity-themed dreams, such as flying dreams, frequently accompany lucid dreaming. Nonetheless, studies are scarce. We attempted to: (1) replicate previous findings using more sensitive static balance measures and (2) extend...
Journal of Sleep Research
February 1, 2022
Claudia Picard-Deland, Tore Nielsen
Although new learning is known to reappear in later dream scenarios, the timing of such reappearances remains unclear. Sometimes, references to new learning occur relatively quickly, 1 day post-learning (day-residue effect); at other times there may be a substantive delay, 5-7 days, before such references appear (dream-lag effect). We studied temporal delays in dream reactivation following the...
PLoS One
October 6, 2021
Claudia Picard-Deland, Tore Nielsen, Michelle Carr
27 citations
The phenomenon of dreaming about the laboratory when participating in a sleep study is common. The content of such dreams draws upon episodic memory fragments of the participant's lab experience, generally, experimenters, electrodes, the lab setting, and experimental tasks. However, as common as such dreams are, they have rarely been given a thorough quantitative or qualitative treatment. Here...
Neurobiology of Learning and Memory
September 1, 2021
Claudia Picard-Deland, Tomy Aumont, Arnaud Samson-Richer et al.
Sleep facilitates memory consolidation through offline reactivations of memory traces. Dreaming may play a role in memory improvement and may reflect these memory reactivations. To experimentally address this question, we used targeted memory reactivation (TMR), i.e., application, during sleep, of a stimulus that was previously associated with learning, to assess whether it influences...
PsyArXiv
May 11, 2021
Elizaveta Solomonova, Claudia Picard-Deland, Iris L Rapoport et al.
preprint
Background: An upsurge in dream and nightmare frequency has been noted since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and research shows increases in levels of stress, depression and anxiety during this time. Growing evidence suggests that dream content has a bi-directional relationship with psychopathology, and that dreams react to new, personally significant and emotional experiences. The first...
March 14, 2021
Remington Mallett, Claudia Picard-Deland, Wilfred R Pigeon et al.
6 citations
preprint
While material from waking life is often represented in dreams, it is less clear whether and how dreams impact waking life in return. Here, we assessed whether dream mood and content from home diaries predict subsequent waking mood using both subjective self-report and an objective automated word detection approach. Subjective ratings of dream and morning mood were highly correlated within...
PLoS One
2021
Elizaveta Solomonova, Claudia Picard-Deland, Iris L Rapoport et al.
An upsurge in dream and nightmare frequency has been noted since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and research shows increases in levels of stress, depression and anxiety during this time. Growing evidence suggests that dream content has a bi-directional relationship with psychopathology, and that dreams react to new, personally significant and emotional experiences. The first lockdown...
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2020
Claudia Picard-Deland, Maude Pastor, Elizaveta Solomonova et al.
25 citations
Despite a high prevalence and broad interest in flying dreams, these exceptional experiences remain infrequent. Our study aimed to (1) induce flying dreams using a custom-built virtual reality (VR) flying task, (2) examine their phenomenological correlates and (3) investigate their relations to participant state and trait factors. 137 participants underwent VR-flying followed by a morning nap....
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2020
Cloé Blanchette-Carrière, Sarah-Hélène Julien, Claudia Picard-Deland et al.
20 citations
Neurophysiological correlates of self-awareness during sleep ('lucid dreaming') remain unclear despite their importance for clarifying the neural underpinnings of consciousness. Transcranial direct (tDC) and alternating (tAC) current stimulation during sleep have been shown to increase dream self-awareness, but these studies' methodological weaknesses prompted us to undertake additional study....
Sleep Medicine
April 1, 2019
Tore Nielsen, Michelle Carr, Claudia Picard-Deland et al.
OBJECTIVE Childhood adversity figures prominently in the clinical histories of children and adolescents suffering from a panoply of physical, mental or sleep disorders, including posttraumatic stress disorder. But the nature and prevalence of early adversity in the case of idiopathic nightmare-prone individuals have received little study. We characterize the types and frequencies of...
Sleep Medicine
December 1, 2018
Claudia Picard-Deland, Michelle Carr, Tyna Paquette et al.
Nightmares are a common sleep disorder, defined as highly disturbing mentation which usually awakens the individual from rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. While nightmares are mainly a REM sleep phenomenon, Picard-Deland et al., (2017) recently showed an association between nightmare recall and sleep spindles, which are a non-rapid eye movement (NREM) oscillatory feature. Their results pointed to...
Sleep Medicine
October 1, 2018
Claudia Picard-Deland, Michelle Carr, Tyna Paquette et al.
Idiopathic nightmares are a common disturbance of rapid eye movement sleep (REM) sleep, but studies of comorbid pathologies and sleep architecture suggest that non-REM (NREM) sleep is also affected. Sleep spindles are a NREM sleep characteristic associated with both pathophysiology and sleep-dependent memory consolidation, yet they have not been evaluated in frequent nightmare recallers. The...
March 1, 2017
Tore Nielsen, Michelle Carr, Cloé Blanchette-Carrière et al.
Both rapid eye movement (REM) sleep dreaming and non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep spindles have been linked to processes of memory consolidation. However, relationships between the two phenomena have yet to be explored. In a heterogeneous sample of 53 healthy subjects who had participated in a memory consolidation protocol and who varied in their self-reported recall of dreams and...