Abstract Background Approximately 5% of people suffer from nightmares at least every 2 weeks. One cognitive behavioral intervention for recurrent nightmares is imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT), in which individuals recall, modify, and rehearse a less distressing version of their dream. Objective This randomized controlled trial evaluated the efficacy of a web application called “DreamMend” as a...
Dreams take us to a different reality, a hallucinatory world that feels as real as any waking experience. These often-bizarre episodes are emblematic of human sleep but have yet to be adequately explained. Retrospective dream reports are subject to distortion and forgetting, presenting a fundamental challenge for neuroscientific studies of dreaming. Here we show that individuals who are asleep...
During dreaming, we experience a wake-like hallucinatory reality, however with restricted reflective abilities: in the face of a bizarre dream environment, we do not realize that we are actually dreaming. In contrast, during the rare phenomenon of lucid dreaming, the dreamer gains insight into the current state of mind while staying asleep. This metacognitive insight often enables the dreamer...