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...
This special issue unites original theoretical and empirical research on two topics that are gaining traction in cognitive neuroscience and psychology, but so far have small philosophical footprints: dreaming and waking mind wandering. While the fields of dream and mind wandering research are largely separate, phenomenological and neurophysiological similarities between waking mind wandering...
Spontaneous thoughts and experiences, including mind wandering and dreaming, make up a significant proportion of our conscious mental lives. An influential proposal posits that dreaming and mind wandering exist on a continuum of spontaneous thought, in which dreaming is intensified compared to mind wandering. Yet the precise relationship between dreaming and mind wandering is only beginning to...
The concept of narrative is widespread in the philosophical literature on dreams. Although several works have examined the putative narrative character of dreams by drawing on narratology, literary theory, and semiotics, there has been virtually no investigation of how preconceptions about the resemblance between fictional narratives and retrospective dream reports have shaped the philosophical...
Lucid dreaming (LD) – in which dreamers become aware that they are currently dreaming – has gained increasing attention in consciousness studies, yet its fine-grained experiential dynamics remain undercharacterized. We conducted in-depth micro-phenomenological interviews on 22 signal-verified lucid dreams experienced in a controlled sleep-laboratory setting, mapping within-episode dynamics from...
The most well known study on doing nothing concluded that being alone for 15 mins with nothing to do but think is aversive. Here we examine skilful doing nothing in the form of Stillness Meditation. Meditation-naive adult participants (N = 165) were randomly allocated to 15 mins of Stillness Meditation or one of two active controls (Focused Attention and Audiobook). Stillness Meditation...
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...
Abstract Spontaneous thoughts and experiences, such as dreaming and mind wandering, form a significant part of our conscious mental lives. Yet, the precise phenomenological and content-related similarities and differences between dreaming and waking mind wandering remain insufficiently understood. In this study, we address this gap by comparing 340 dreaming and mind wandering questionnaire...
During wakefulness, our thoughts transition between different contents. However, there are moments that are seemingly devoid of reportable content, referred to as mind blanking (MB). It remains unclear what these blanks represent, highlighting the definitional and phenomenological ambiguities surrounding MB. We map out MB in terms of its reportable expressions, neurophysiology, and relationship...
Fluctuations in the presence, experiential quality and contents of consciousness occur naturally during sleep and wakefulness and are core features of the healthy human mind. The purpose of this article is to consider the possibility that such fluctuations, including mind wandering and dreaming, which we refer to collectively as spontaneous thoughts and experiences (STE), may also be important...
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are characterized by the subjective experience of being located outside the physical body. Little is known about the neurophysiology of spontaneous OBEs, which are often reported by healthy individuals as occurring during states of reduced vigilance, particularly in proximity to or during sleep (sleep-related OBEs). In this paper, we review the current state of...
Spontaneous thoughts, such as dreaming and mind wandering, constitute a significant portion of human consciousness. Yet, the precise phenomenological and content-related similarities and differences between dreaming and waking mind wandering remain insufficiently understood. In this study, we address this gap by comparing 340 dreaming and mind wandering questionnaires that depending on the...
Depersonalisation (DP) is characterized by fundamental alterations to the sense of self that include feelings of detachment and estrangement from one's body. We conducted an online study in healthy participants (n = 514) with DP traits to investigate and quantify the subjective experience of body and self during waking and dreaming, as the vast majority of previous studies focussed on waking...
Out-of body experiences (OBEs) are characterized by the subjective experience of being located outside the physical body. Evidence supports that OBEs triggered by electrical stimulation and epileptic seizures are associated with disrupted brain activity in a distributed network centred at the temporo-parietal junction and the resulting multisensory disruption of body representation. However,...
Abstract Objectives Contentless experience involves an absence of mental content such as thoughts and perceptions. It is often described as pure consciousness or complete stillness/silence, and is a goal in Shamatha, Thai Forest, and Stillness Meditation. This study examined the subjective character of the deepest experience of stillness/silence typically reported in each practice, and whether...
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...
Depersonalisation (DP) is characterized by fundamental alterations to the sense of self that include feelings of detachment and estrangement from one’s body. We conducted an online study in healthy participants (n=514) with DP traits to investigate and quantify the subjective experience of body and self during waking and dreaming, as the vast majority of previous studies focussed on waking...
Abstract In contentless experience (sometimes termed pure consciousness ) there is an absence of mental content such as thought, perception, and mental imagery. The path to contentless experience in meditation can be taken to comprise the meditation technique, and the experiences (“interim-states”) on the way to the contentless “goal-state/s”. Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation...
Abstract Contentless experience involves an absence of mental content such as thought, perception, and mental imagery. In academic work it has been classically treated as including states like those aimed for in Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation. We have used evidence synthesis to select and review 135 expert texts from within the three traditions. In this paper we identify the...
AbstractObjectivesThe objective was to examine the impact of state and trait mindfulness cultivated through body scan meditation, on bodily multisensory integration, in order to explore effects of increased non-judgmental/accepting attention to ambiguous bodily sensations.MethodsMultisensory integration was operationalised through the rubber hand illusion, which was measured through subjective...
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...
Attentional lapses occur commonly and are associated with mind wandering, where focus is turned to thoughts unrelated to ongoing tasks and environmental demands, or mind blanking, where the stream of consciousness itself comes to a halt. To understand the neural mechanisms underlying attentional lapses, we studied the behaviour, subjective experience and neural activity of healthy participants...
Whether we are awake or asleep is believed to mark a sharp divide between the types of conscious states we undergo in either behavioural state. Consciousness in sleep is often equated with dreaming and thought to be characteristically different from waking consciousness. Conversely, recent research shows that we spend a substantial amount of our waking lives mind wandering, or lost in...
Abstract Attentional lapses are ubiquitous and can negatively impact performance. They correlate with mind wandering, or thoughts that are unrelated to ongoing tasks and environmental demands. In other cases, the stream of consciousness itself comes to a halt and the mind goes blank. What happens in the brain that leads to these mental states? To understand the neural mechanisms underlying...
Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation are said to aim for "contentless" experiences, where mental content such as thoughts, perceptions, and mental images is absent. Silence is understood to be a central feature of those experiences. The main source of information about the experiences is texts by experts from within the three traditions. Previous research has tended not to use an...