Objective: Over the past 60 years, contemplative practices have been shown to alleviate certain mental health symptoms. Humans spend approximately one third of their lives asleep, yet there is limited scientific investigation of the benefit of performing contemplative exercises during sleep. Tibetan Buddhist Dream Yoga (TBDY) is a contemplative practice where dreamers perform mental exercises...
Dreams may partially reflect the memory reorganizing that occurs nightly, improving the usefulness of what we learn each day. However, solid evidence has yet to link dreaming with adaptive overnight memory reorganization. Establishing this link faces several challenges, including the difficulty of experimentally controlling dream content and the susceptibility of dream reports to distortion and...
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 scientific study of lucid sleep, defined as the ability to retain critical self-awareness during ongoing sleep, has traditionally focused on lucid dreaming and induction techniques that specifically target REM sleep. Recently, interest has grown to include other forms of lucid sleep, such as out-of-body experiences, sleep paralysis, and “witnessing-sleep” episodes described in Indian...
AIMS: (1) Test whether dreaming holds a key to understanding assumptions that tacitly constrain our waking lives. (2) Quantify effects of Dream-Yoga-inspired procedures for exploring and surmounting constraints of the perception box. BACKGROUND: People spend a third of their lives asleep, usually oblivious to the opportunities for enhanced well-being that sleep offers. Over centuries,...
Recent years have seen a heightened focus on the study of minimal forms of awareness during sleep to advance the study of consciousness and understand what makes a state conscious. This focus draws on an increased interest in anecdotical descriptions made by classic Indian philosophical traditions about unusual forms of awareness during sleep. For instance, in the so-called state of...
Mindfulness‐based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is a novel treatment for depression. Our published randomized controlled trial shows that MBCT improves symptoms of late‐life depression (LLD) and anxiety (LLA). We now examine whether continuation sessions of MBCT (MBCT‐C) can prevent LLD/LLA symptom recurrence.
Abstract Mindfulness and transcendental meditation techniques have emerging research supporting them as positive additions to treatment as usual/standard care for mood and/or cognitive disorders among older adults. This session will highlight this recent research and evidence of the benefits of these interventions in the context of late-life depression (LLD) and late-life anxiety (LLA). In the...