Abstract Sense of Agency (SoA), the subjective experience of initiating and controlling one’s actions, is a critical component of self-perception and consciousness, and is often degraded in different psychopathologies. Individuals with dissociation seem to have diminished SoA, but it is yet unknown whether this affects communication with their surroundings. This study employs Natural Language...
Psychosis has been likened to dream-like mentation permeating waking, with hallucinatory experiences, flawed logic, and salience of one’s internal world over sensory perception. Some exceptional dream and sleep experiences have been viewed as representing hybrid states between sleep and waking, for example, dreams of falling/flying, dreams of awakening, lucid dreams, sleepwalking, hypnagogic...
Maladaptive daydreaming is a distinct syndrome in which the main symptom is excessive vivid fantasising that causes clinically significant distress and functional impairment in academic, vocational and social domains. Unlike normal daydreaming, maladaptive daydreaming is persistent, compulsive and detrimental to one’s life. It involves detachment from reality in favour of intense emotional...
During most dreams, the dreamer does not realize that they are in a dream. In contrast, lucid dreaming allows to become aware of the current state of mind, often accompanied by considerable control over the ongoing dream episode. Lucid dreams can happen spontaneously or be induced through diverse behavioural, cognitive or technological strategies. Such induction techniques have spurred research...
The intuitive experience of dreaming is that we “see” something with our mind’s eye and react to it. Indeed, dream formation conceptualizations have often focused on the visual image-to-verbal thought direction of causality, inspired by bottom-up models of perception. However, despite being experienced as external to us, the dream environment is internally generated, meaning that dreams are...
Maladaptive daydreaming (MD) is a compulsive form of daydreaming that causes distress and functional impairment. We present the first treatment trial for MD. We tested the effectiveness of an eight-session internet-based self-help training for mindfulness and self-monitoring and compared three groups across three measurement points in time. A sample of 557 people was randomly assigned. A total...
A strong and specific link between obsessive-compulsive disorder or symptoms (OCD/S) and a tendency for dissociative experiences (e.g., depersonalization-derealization, absorption and imaginative involvement) cannot be explained by trauma and is poorly understood. The present theoretical formulation proposes five different models conceptualizing the relationship. According to Model 1,...
Reality shifting (RS) is a trendy mental activity that emerged abruptly following the flare-up of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and seems to be practiced mainly by members of the post-millennial generation. RS, described as the experience of being able to transcend one's physical confines and visit alternate, mostly fictional, universes, is discussed by many on Internet platforms. One RS forum...
Dissociation refers to a disintegration between psychological elements; common manifestations are embodied in "absorption and imaginative involvement," a propensity for being immersed in a stimulus while oblivious to the environment, and acting without awareness. Trait dissociation was hypothesized to relate to lower EEG signal connectivity, but studies on healthy populations are scarce. The...
Lucid Dreaming (LD) is awareness that one is dreaming, during the dream state. However, some define and assess LD relying also on controlling dream events, although control is present only in a subset of lucid dreams. LD has been claimed to represent well-being, and has even been used as a therapeutic agent. Conversely, LD is associated with mixed sleep-wake states, which are related to bizarre...
Several short-term pathways have been implicated in relation to dissociative experiences, among them are daily stress, sleepiness, and rumination. In addition, it has been claimed that mechanisms contributing to dissociative experiences may differ, according to specific psychopathological symptoms. Accordingly, this study had two aims. The first was to sample moment-to-moment increases or...
The term "sleep experiences," coined by Watson (2001), denotes an array of unusual nocturnal consciousness phenomena; for example, nightmares, vivid or recurrent dreams, hypnagogic hallucinations, dreams of falling or flying, confusional arousals, and lucid dreams. Excluding the latter, these experiences reflect a single factor of atypical oneiric cognitions ("general sleep experiences"). The...
Unique dream patterns are related to psychopathological distress in adults. In adolescence, this was investigated almost exclusively regarding nightmares. This longitudinal study examines developmental trajectories of various adolescent‐reported dream patterns, and their associations with parent‐reported psychopathology (internalization and externalization problems) in early adolescence....
Building on the previously documented effects of stress and dissociation on sleep and dreaming, we examined their interactive role in general sleep-related experiences (GSEs; e.g., nightmares, falling dreams, hypnagogic hallucinations; see Watson, 2001). Stress, sleep quality, and GSEs were assessed daily for 14 days among young adults. Baseline assessment included life stress, sleep quality,...
The relationship between resilience and lucid dreams, which involves awareness of the experience of dreaming, was examined in 79 Israeli young adults. Psychological distress and lucid dreams 3 years prior to exposure to terrorism, and exposure levels and psychological distress 1 week following exposure, were assessed. Both indirect exposure through media and perceived stress predicted an...
General sleep-related experiences (Watson, 2001), including special dream states such as elevated dream recall, nightmares, hypnagogic hallucinations, flying dreams, and waking dreams, have been shown to be associated with life stress and psychopathological distress (Soffer-Dudek & Shahar, 2009). In this study, we attempted to examine these associations within the context of terror-related...
Sleep-related experiences [Watson, D. (2001). Dissociations of the night: Individual differences in sleep-related experiences and their relation to dissociation and schizotypy. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 110, 526-535] refer to a host of nocturnal altered-consciousness phenomena, including narcoleptic tendencies, nightmares, problem-solving dreams, waking dreams, and lucid dreams. In an...