Philosophy and the Mind Sciences
January 5, 2026
Jennifer Windt, Manuela Kirberg, Tomas Andrillon
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...
Consciousness and Cognition
2026
Manuela Kirberg, Jennifer Windt
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...
Topoi
December 3, 2025
Gaia Mizzon, Jennifer Windt
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...
September 30, 2025
Toby J. Woods, Andrew W. Corcoran, Olivia Carter et al.
preprint
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...
Nature Communications
August 13, 2025
William Wong, Rubén Herzog, Kátia Cristine Andrade et al.
10 citations
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 11, 2025
Manuela Kirberg, Jonathan Robinson, Jennifer Windt
3 citations
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...
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
March 12, 2025
Thomas Andrillon, Antoine Lutz, Jennifer Windt et al.
14 citations
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...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2025
Jasmine Walter, Thomas Andrillon, Jennifer Windt
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...
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
August 1, 2024
Teresa Campillo-Ferrer, Adriana Alcaraz-Sánchez, Ema Demšar et al.
14 citations
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...
April 29, 2024
Manuela Kirberg, Jonathan Edward Robinson, Jennifer Windt
preprint
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...
Scientific Reports
March 13, 2024
Matt P D Gwyther, Bigna Lenggenhager, Jennifer Windt et al.
3 citations
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...
Mindfulness
June 1, 2023
Toby J. Woods, Jennifer Windt, Lydia Brown et al.
15 citations
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...
May 16, 2023
William Wong, Kátia C. Andrade, Thomas Andrillon et al.
21 citations
preprint
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
June 2, 2022
Toby J. Woods, Jennifer Windt, Olivia Carter
13 citations
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...
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
May 24, 2022
Toby J. Woods, Jennifer Windt, Olivia Carter
17 citations
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...
Mindfulness
May 1, 2022
Tess Guthrie, Julian R. Matthews, Richard Chambers et al.
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...
Nature Communications
June 29, 2021
Thomas Andrillon, Angus C. Burns, Teigane Mackay et al.
13 citations
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...
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences
December 13, 2020
Jennifer Windt
56 citations
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...
Frontiers in Psychology
July 8, 2020
Toby J. Woods, Jennifer Windt, Olivia Carter
25 citations
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...
Philosophy Compass
April 1, 2020
Jennifer Windt
Abstract Sleep is phenomenologically rich, teeming with different kinds of conscious thought and experience. Dreaming is the most prominent example, but there is more to conscious experience in sleep than dreaming. Especially in non‐rapid eye movement sleep, conscious experience, sometimes dreamful, sometimes dreamless, also alternates with a loss of consciousness. Yet while dreaming has become...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2020
William Wong, Valdas Noreika, Levente Móró et al.
35 citations
The Dream Catcher test defines the criteria for a genuine discovery of the neural constituents of phenomenal consciousness. Passing the test implies that some patterns of purely brain-based data directly correspond to the subjective features of phenomenal experience, which would help to bridge the explanatory gap between consciousness and brain. Here, we conducted the Dream Catcher test for the...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
May 27, 2019
William Wong, Valdas Noreika, Levente Móró et al.
preprint
The Dream Catcher test defines the criteria for a genuine discovery of the neural constituents of phenomenal consciousness. Passing the test implies that some patterns of purely brain-based data directly correspond to the subjective features of phenomenal experience, which would help to bridge the explanatory gap between consciousness and brain. Here, we conducted the Dream Catcher test for the...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
April 12, 2019
Valdas Noreika, Jennifer Windt, Markus Kern et al.
preprint
Recently, cortical correlates of specific dream contents have been reported, such as the activation of the sensorimotor cortex during dreamed hand clenching. Yet, the causal mechanisms underlying specific dream content remain largely elusive. Here, we investigated how alterations in the excitability of sensorimotor areas through transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) might alter dream...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2019
Jennifer Windt
8 citations
Nielsen proposes that a microdynamic approach to experiences occurring in the earliest stages of sleep onset, which he calls microdreams, can shed light on the process of dream imagery formation. I discuss microdreams in the context of simulation views, in which dreaming is defined as the immersive experience of a virtual world centered on a virtual self. I also evaluate his proposal to expand...
Oxford Handbooks Online
April 5, 2018
Jennifer Windt, Ursula Voss
Dreams are sometimes described as an intensified form of spontaneous waking thought. Lucid dreams may seem to be a counterexample, because metacognitive insight into the fact that one is now dreaming is often associated with the ability to deliberately control the ongoing dream. This chapter uses conceptual considerations and empirical research findings to argue that lucid dreaming is in fact a...