Trends in Cognitive Sciences
December 1, 2016
Jennifer Windt, Tore Nielsen, Evan Thompson
Consciousness is often said to disappear in deep, dreamless sleep. We argue that this assumption is oversimplified. Unless dreamless sleep is defined as unconscious from the outset there are good empirical and theoretical reasons for saying that a range of different types of sleep experience, some of which are distinct from dreaming, can occur in all stages of sleep. We introduce a novel...
Monash University Research Portal
2015
Jennifer Windt
30 citations
In this commentary, I propose a strategy for extending Evan Thompson’s argument on the existence of dreamless sleep experience. My first aim is to show that the Indian debate on reports of having slept peacefully is importantly similar to debates in scientific dream research and contemporary Western philosophy on the trustworthiness of dream reports. This analogy leads to a surprising...
2015
Evan Thompson, Jennifer Windt
17 citations
One of the major debates in classical Indian philosophy concerned whether consciousness is present or absent in dreamless sleep. The philosophical schools of Advaita Vedānta and Yoga maintained that consciousness is present in dreamless sleep, whereas the Nyāya school maintained that it is absent. Consideration of this debate, especially the reasoning used by Advaita Vedānta to rebut the Nyāya...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2014
Jennifer Windt, Dominic L Harkness, Bigna Lenggenhager
The contrast between self- and other-produced tickles, as a special case of sensory attenuation for self-produced actions, has long been a target of empirical research. While in standard wake states it is nearly impossible to tickle oneself, there are interesting exceptions. Notably, participants awakened from REM (rapid eye movement-) sleep dreams are able to tickle themselves. So far,...
Consciousness and Cognition
March 1, 2013
Ursula Voss, Karin Schermelleh-Engel, Jennifer Windt et al.
In this article, we present results from an interdisciplinary research project aimed at assessing consciousness in dreams. For this purpose, we compared lucid dreams with normal non-lucid dreams from REM sleep. Both lucid and non-lucid dreams are an important contrast condition for theories of waking consciousness, giving valuable insights into the structure of conscious experience and its...
heiDOK (Heidelberg University)
2010
Valdas Noreika, Jennifer Windt, Bigna Lenggenhager et al.
54 citations
The neural mechanisms underlying lucid dreaming have recently been investigated using brain imaging techniques such as electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging, which produce insightful but merely correlative results. We propose that research on the neurophysiology of lucid dreaming, for instance concerning the exact relationship between the dorsolateral prefrontal...
Chikayo Hemmi, Angus Leung, Jennifer Windt et al.
preprint
Dream experiences during sleep provide an excellent opportunity to investigate the neural basis of consciousness. Previous studies have examined the neural correlates of dreaming using electroencephalography (EEG), focusing on spectral power in specific frequency bands. However, findings have been inconsistent, particularly regarding the spatiotemporal characteristics of these correlates,...
Ema Demšar, Jennifer Windt
In this chapter, we present the problem of dream reports in philosophy and empirical research, examine how the variability of methods and measures influences research results, and suggest that research on the phenomenological features of dreaming could benefit from insights from first-person methods in consciousness research. We consider two interview-based methods developed for acquiring...
Jennifer Windt, Naotsugu Tsuchiya, Thomas Andrillon
preprint
We spend a third of our lives asleep, and sleep teems with vivid dreams. While most people rarely remember their dreams, laboratory studies using timed awakenings show that healthy adults experience multiple dreams per night. Dreams have been hypothesised to play a key role in the development of consciousness and cognition1,2. Dreams are believed to contribute to sleep-related memory...