Abstract: Background and Aims: Understanding the factors that lead to participation in psychedelic clinical trials is essential for assessing potential biases in enrollment and ensuring the generalizability of findings. Psychedelic treatment is thought to impact personality traits, psychological flexibility, and expectations, yet the role of these non-pharmacological variables in the initial...
Combining meditation with psychoactive substances is often assumed to be a niche practice centred on classic psychedelics. We sought to broaden this narrative in two cross-sectional studies. Study 1 used a broad naturalistic sample (N = 1,391) to examine the prevalence of substance use, meditation, and their simultaneous combination, as well as associations with subjective happiness. Study 2...
Abstract The language people use to describe their inner experiences arising during sleep and wakefulness provides a window into the mind. Dreams and unguided waking thought, here referred to as mind wandering, are thought to reflect unique individual differences and mental health. Here we use graph theory to analyse a large dataset of dream (n = 1434) and mind wandering (n = 1619) reports from...
Dreaming during anaesthesia has been documented for over a century, yet it remains poorly understood. This scoping review synthesises evidence on the frequency, phenomenology, predictors, outcomes, and neural correlates of anaesthesia dreaming. We systematically searched multiple databases for studies examining anaesthesia dreaming, including clinical trials, observational studies, and...
Sleep plays an important role in affective processing and affect regulation during wakefulness. Dreaming-the subjective experiences occurring during sleep-has been suggested to reflect, or even contribute to, waking affect regulation. However, the role of dream affect in waking affect regulation has rarely been studied directly. Here, we investigated how dream affect relates to waking affect...
Ketamine has well-known dissociative, analgesic, and antidepressant properties, but it is unknown whether the neurophysiologic effects that are associated with these properties can be modulated separately from one another. Considering that specific cortical oscillations have been associated with specific therapeutic effects, modulating selective aspects of ketamine neurophysiology could inform...
INTRODUCTION Ketamine shows promise for treatment-refractory chronic pain and depression, but randomized trials risk unblinding from ketamine's acute dissociative effects. Propofol sedation may mitigate this, though it has not been prospectively tested as a masking strategy outside of surgical contexts. METHODS This protocol describes a single-center, randomized, double-blind,...
BACKGROUND: Dreaming during anesthesia is common and may have mental health benefits. However, systematic research on its incidence and outcomes in clinical settings remains limited. This study implemented a standardized propofol-based, electroencephalography (EEG)-guided emergence bundle to facilitate a preemergence state conducive to dreaming, integrating it into routine care to assess...
Psychedelics and meditation can facilitate transformative experiences with acute changes in sensory processing and self-perception, but research about their relation to narrative and affective-attitudinal body image remains limited. We examined body image themes in psychedelic and meditative experience narratives, compared these between experience types, and examined their associations with...
Psychedelic substances and meditation can elicit personally meaningful experiences that support well-being, yet their relative and combined contributions remain unclear. Meditation typically produces gradual improvements through sustained practice, whereas psychedelics may induce acute shifts. To examine these dynamics, we re-analysed data from two cross-sectional online surveys using multiple...
Background and Aims: Understanding the factors that lead to participation in psychedelic clinical trials is essential for assessing potential biases in enrollment and ensuring the generalizability of findings. Psychedelic treatment is thought to impact personality traits, psychological flexibility, and expectations, however these non-pharmacological variables may also influence the initial...
Magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) studies of dreaming are an essential paradigm in the investigation of neurocognitive processes of human consciousness during sleep, but they are limited by the number of observations that can be collected per study. Dream research also involves substantial methodological and conceptual variability, which poses problems for the integration of results. To...
Structured Abstract Importance Ketamine has well known dissociative, analgesic, and antidepressant properties, but it is unknown whether the neurophysiologic effects that are associated with these properties can be modulated separately from one another. Given prior studies that link specific cortical oscillations with specific therapeutic effects, it is likely that modulating selective aspects...
Both psychedelic substances and meditation have been proposed to facilitate personally meaningful and transformative experiences, with insights playing a central role. However, previous research has mainly relied on questionnaires, limiting the range of insights that can be identified. In this study, we recruited participants who provided narrative reports of insights in personally meaningful...
Increased psychological flexibility (PF) may underlie the lasting positive effects of psychedelic experiences on mental well-being. The associations between different components of PF, psychological inflexibility (PI), and well-being with psychedelic use are not well understood. We conducted a cross-sectional internet survey of participants (N = 629) with experience of classical psychedelics....
Magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) studies of dreaming are an essential paradigm in the investigation of neurocognitive processes of human consciousness during sleep, but they are limited by the number of observations that can be collected per study. Dream research also involves substantial methodological and conceptual variability, which poses problems for the integration of results. To...
There is increasing evidence that sleep plays an important role in affective processing. However, it is unclear whether dreaming-the subjective experiences we have during sleep-also serves an affect regulation function. Here, we investigated the within-person relationship between negative affect experienced in dreams and next-day waking affect level, affect reactivity, and affect regulation....
Despite a surge of studies on the effects of COVID-19 on our well-being, we know little about how the pandemic is reflected in people’s spontaneous thoughts and experiences, such as mind-wandering (or daydreaming) during wakefulness and dreaming during sleep. We investigated whether and how COVID-19 related general concern, anxiety, and daily worry are associated with the daily fluctuation of...
Affective experiences occur across the wake-sleep cycle—from active wakefulness to resting wakefulness (i.e., mind-wandering or daydreaming) to sleep (i.e., dreaming). Yet, we know little about the dynamics of affective experiences across these states. Here, we investigated the within-person fluctuations in the prevalence and valence of affect experienced during mind-wandering and night-time...
Affective experiences are central not only to our waking life but also to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep dreams. Despite our increasing understanding of the neural correlates of dreaming, we know little about the neural correlates of dream affect. Frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) is considered a marker of affective states and traits as well as affect regulation in the waking state. Here, we...
Affective experiences are central not only to our waking life but also to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep dreams. While the neural correlates of REM sleep are well documented, we know little about the neural correlates of dream affect. Frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA) is considered a marker of affective states and traits as well as affect regulation in the waking state. Here, we explored whether...
Waking mental well-being is assumed to be tightly linked to sleep and the affective content of dreams. However, empirical research is scant and has mostly focused on ill-being by studying the dreams of people with psychopathology. We explored the relationship between waking well-being and dream affect by measuring not only symptoms of ill-being but also different types and components of...
The aim of this study was to compare the emotional content of dream reports collected at home upon morning awakenings with those collected in the laboratory upon early and late rapid eye movement (REM) sleep awakenings. Eighteen adults (11 women, seven men; mean age = 25.89 ± 4.85) wrote down their home dreams every morning immediately upon awakening during a 7-day period. Participants also...
Abstract This study demonstrates that different methods for measuring emotional experiences in dreams—self-ratings of dreams using emotion rating scales versus external ratings in the form of content analysis of narrative dream reports—can lead to strikingly different results and contradicting conclusions about the emotional content of home dreams. During 3 consecutive weeks, every morning upon...
We investigated whether inconsistencies in previous studies regarding emotional experiences in dreams derive from whether dream emotions are self-rated or externally evaluated. Seventeen subjects were monitored with polysomnography in the sleep laboratory and awakened from every rapid eye movement (REM) sleep stage 5 min after the onset of the stage. Upon awakening, participants gave an oral...