Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
January 1, 2013
Kieran C. R. Fox, Savannah Nijeboer, Elizaveta Solomonova et al.
297 citations
Mind wandering during wakefulness and dreaming during sleep share many features: both involve audiovisual, emotional, fantasy-tinged narratives tied to personal concerns, draw on long-term memory, simulate social interactions, and lack meta-awareness. Comparing neuroimaging data shows that both states activate default mode network regions such as medial prefrontal cortex, medial temporal lobe, and posterior cingulate, which support self-referential thought and memory. However, dreaming appears as an intensified version of mind wandering, with longer, more immersive, and more visual content, along with even deeper deactivation of prefrontal executive regions responsible for cognitive control and metacognition. This suggests dreaming amplifies the same features that distinguish mind wandering from goal-directed thought.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
July 18, 2023
Nicolas Garel, Julien Thibault Lévesque, Dasha A. Sandra et al.
29 citations
Past environmental exposures can significantly shape psychedelic drug experiences and their therapeutic outcomes, a concept the authors call 'imprinting.' In a clinical trial of ketamine for treatment-resistant depression, two patients' subjective experiences were altered by the type and amount of digital media they consumed in the days before treatment: higher media exposure reduced mystical and emotional qualities of the ketamine experience, overriding standard intention-setting practices and changing therapeutic results. Eight additional patients spontaneously reported past environmental exposures manifesting as visual hallucinations during ketamine sessions. Similar imprinting effects appear in historical reports of other psychedelic drugs and in dreaming. The authors propose expanding the contextual model of psychedelic action to include imprinting, which may help clinicians and researchers better understand these drug effects.
Consciousness and Cognition
August 1, 2020
Claudia Picard-Deland, Maude Pastor, Elizaveta Solomonova et al.
25 citations
Flying dreams, though common, rarely occur. In a study with 137 participants, a virtual reality flying task followed by a morning nap increased reports of flying dreams during the nap and the following morning, compared to baseline rates and a control group. These dreams also showed greater lucid control and emotional intensity. Prior dream-flying experience and the level of VR sensory immersion influenced induction. The results support a vection-based explanation of dream-flying and could aid in developing dream flight-induction technologies.
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
May 23, 2014
Elizaveta Solomonova, Kieran C. R. Fox, Tore Nielsen
17 citations
No Summary
Front Psychol
January 23, 2020
Elizaveta Solomonova, Simon Dubé, Cloé Blanchette-Carrière et al.
9 citations
Vipassana meditation practitioners show different patterns of how sleep consolidates procedural memories compared to non-meditators. The study compared overnight memory retention in meditators and controls, finding that meditators exhibited distinct consolidation processes, suggesting that long-term meditation practice alters sleep-dependent memory processing.
Open MIND
November 1, 2017
Elizaveta Solomonova
2 citations
Dreaming is an embodied process of meaning-making, grounded in the brain, body, and environment. The dissertation argues that dreams are embodied at multiple levels: they contain body representations, are experienced from a first-person perspective with spatial quality, are structured by emotion and affect, and show permeability between the dreamer's body and the dream body, as seen in intensified dreams, parasomnias, and integration of somatosensory stimuli. A literature review on sleep paralysis illustrates how altered body experience affects perception of environment and intersubjective relations. An empirical study found that somatosensory stimulation of the ankle during sleep stages 1 and REM produces varied changes in dream content.
Frontiers in Psychology
October 24, 2025
Elizaveta Solomonova, Jared R. Lindahl, Ian Gold et al.
1 citation
Delusion-like ideation (DLI) occurs in psychopathology and among the general population, and meditation can trigger such experiences. Based on interviews with over 100 Buddhist meditation practitioners and experts, this mixed-methods study establishes a typology of eight types of DLI, reports their relative frequencies, and identifies impacts and treatment outcomes. Four case studies illustrate risk factors, trajectories, outcomes, and appraisals. Responses to DLI depend on type, duration, severity, impact, and appraisals by meditators, teachers, and psychiatrists. Some DLI phenomenology reflects Buddhist meditation cultures; although normalized in certain contexts, meditation experts consider DLI a potential "red flag" requiring monitoring or intervention. Explanatory models include environmental conditions of retreats, attention and sensory attenuation, and DLI as a cultural idiom of distress.
Research Square
November 15, 2022
Kennedy Robertson, Ian Gold, Samuel P. L. Veissière et al.
Delusional ideation, or false beliefs, is linked to social factors such as feeling the presence of unseen others, loneliness, social anxiety, and empathy. A survey of 2,200 healthy adults during the COVID-19 pandemic found that all measured aspects of social imagery were positively associated with delusional ideation. The strongest predictor was felt presence, followed by loneliness, social fear, and empathic concern. The findings suggest that delusions may arise from common mechanisms with social imagination, and that alterations in social cognition contribute to delusional thinking.
January 28, 2022
Sophie Smith, Sofia Hempelmann Perez, Sara Carling et al.
preprint
Nightmares are intense emotional experiences that can disrupt sleep quality and affect most people at some point. This investigation examined how nightmare frequency relates to subjective sleep duration, estimated sleep need, and perceived sleep debt. Frequent nightmare sufferers report sleeping the same amount as those without nightmares, yet they feel a greater sleep debt—they believe they need more sleep than they are getting. This shows the importance of considering subjective sleep experiences and dysphoric dreaming alongside standard measures of sleep quality and duration.
PLoS One
January 1, 2021
Elizaveta Solomonova, Claudia Picard-Deland, Iris L Rapoport et al.
During the first COVID-19 lockdown (April–May 2020), 34% of 968 survey participants reported increased dream recall. The most common dream themes centered on inefficacy, human threat, death, and pandemic imagery. Dream, bad dream, and nightmare frequency was highest among those with moderate to severe stress levels. Frequency of bad dreams, nightmares, and dreams about the pandemic, inefficacy, and death were associated with higher stress, depression, and anxiety symptoms. The findings support theories linking dream content to environmental susceptibility and stress reactivity, with dreams reflecting existential concerns during the lockdown.
Oxford Handbooks Online
April 5, 2018
Elizaveta Solomonova
Sleep paralysis is a temporary inability to move or speak during transitions into or out of sleep, often accompanied by vivid sensory experiences such as visual, auditory, or tactile hallucinations and a feeling of presence. This chapter examines these experiences through enactive cognition and cultural neurophenomenology, reviews current neurophysiological knowledge and related conditions, and suggests coping techniques. As a hybrid state of dreaming and waking, sleep paralysis provides insight into the phenomenology of spontaneous thought during sleep.
arXiv Preprint Archive
April 7, 2017
Elizaveta Solomonova
Sleep paralysis is a temporary inability to move or talk during transitions between sleep and wakefulness, often accompanied by vivid sensory experiences such as visual, auditory, and tactile mentation, along with a distinct feeling of presence. This chapter examines sleep paralysis through the lenses of enactive cognition and cultural neurophenomenology, presenting current neurophysiological knowledge and associated conditions. It also proposes coping techniques. As a hybrid state of dreaming and waking, sleep paralysis provides insight into the phenomenology of spontaneous thought during sleep.
Elizaveta Solomonova, Simon Dubé, Arnaud Samson-Richer et al.
Meditators have longer dreams with friendlier, more compassionate interactions and slightly more references to the body, but their dreams are no more lucid than those of non-meditators. Meditators did not incorporate a procedural learning task or the laboratory into their dreams more often than controls. Among control participants, incorporating the task or laboratory into REM/N2 dreams was linked to improved task performance, while incorporations at sleep onset were tied to slightly worse performance. No relationship between dream content and procedural task performance was found for meditators.
Elizaveta Solomonova, Simon Dubé, Cloé Blanchette-Carrière et al.
Meditation experience alters how sleep supports memory consolidation. In a study of Vipassana meditation practitioners and meditation-naïve controls who napped in a laboratory, both groups improved similarly on a balance task after sleep, but the brain activity underlying that improvement differed. In meditators, task learning was linked to slow occipital sleep spindles and negatively linked to fast spindles, whereas in controls improvement was associated with increased REM sleep. Meditators also had fewer sleep spindles overall, especially in occipital regions. The findings suggest that long-term meditation practice may reorganize sleep-dependent memory processes and compensate for some memory functions of sleep.