Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 2006
Michael Schredl, Claudia Barthold, Josepha Zimmer
Nightmare frequency correlates between children and mothers but not between children and fathers, suggesting a socialization effect in which mothers, as primary caregivers, may influence how often children report nightmares. Dream recall frequency shows only a small, nonsignificant relationship between children and mothers. These findings support Cohen's 1973 hypothesis that family environment, particularly maternal influence, shapes nightmare frequency and possibly dream recall.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
February 1, 2006
Michael Schredl, Stephany Fulda, Iris Reinhard
No link was found between a full moon and how often people remember their dreams. Diaries kept by 196 participants for 28 to 111 nights showed no association between a full moon and dream recall. Psychological factors may explain why some people believe a full moon affects their dreaming.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
October 1, 2005
Michael Schredl, Stephany Fulda
People tend to remember their dreams more on mornings after they have slept longer than usual, even though individuals who generally sleep more do not recall dreams more often than those who sleep less. This conclusion comes from daily diaries kept by 196 participants over 28 to 111 days. The finding suggests that a person's own variation in sleep length, rather than their average sleep duration, influences dream recall. Morning sleep inertia may explain why longer sleep boosts recall.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
February 1, 2005
Among 71 medical students, those who more often recalled their dreams also tended to score higher on measures of proneness to altered states of consciousness and dissociation. However, when all factors were considered together, neither altered states of consciousness, dissociation, sex, nor age significantly predicted how frequently someone recalled their dreams. The relationship differed by sex: for women, dream recall frequency was linked to dissociation, while for men it was linked to altered states of consciousness.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 2004
Barry A Tanner
A 23-year-old woman who had experienced nightmares for 17 years was treated with a combination of relaxation procedures, a mnemonic to increase lucid dreaming, and dream rehearsal upon waking from a nightmare. Unlike typical nightmares reported in the literature, hers lacked a common theme and did not respond to several frequently used techniques. Previous treatment episodes had not affected the incidence of the nightmares, but the combination approach resulted in a sharp decrease in nightmare frequency within four sessions. Further improvement was reported over the next nine months as additional techniques were introduced, and the gains were maintained during a nine-month follow-up.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 2004
Daniel Erlacher, Michael Schredl
Time perception in lucid dreams mirrors waking life for mental tasks but slows for physical ones. Five experienced lucid dreamers counted and performed squats both while awake and during lucid dreams. Counting took about as long in dreams as in wakefulness, but squats required more time in the dream state. The findings suggest that cognitive processes maintain their waking tempo during lucid dreaming, whereas motor actions are prolonged.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 2004
Michael Schredl
A 7-point Dream Recall Frequency scale shows high retest reliability in a sample of 198 patients with sleep disorders (115 women, 83 men; average age 45.8 years). When the scale is embedded in a general sleep questionnaire without explicitly directing attention to dream recall, the previously observed increase in reported dream recall due to measurement does not occur. The scale is well suited for reliably measuring stable differences in how often people recall dreams.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 2000
Hitoshi Okada, Kazuo Matsuoka, Takao Hatakeyama
Higher dream-recall frequency is associated with more vivid voluntary waking imagery and more frequent use of visual imagery, but not with control over visual imagery. Among 323 undergraduates, frequent dream recallers (n=82) scored higher on vividness of visual imagery and reported more use of visual imagery than infrequent recallers (n=80). Dream recall was significantly related to scores on visual, cutaneous, and organic sensory subscales, but not to auditory, gustatory, kinaesthetic, or olfactory subscales. No sex differences were found. The findings support Cohen's salience theory, suggesting that voluntarily forming vivid waking images helps retrieve or preserve dream images.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
April 1, 1999
Mitsuo Hayashi, Kohich Katoh, Tadao Hori
Hypnagogic imagery—the fleeting visual or sensory experiences that occur at the onset of sleep—varies systematically with specific brainwave stages. Seven adults reported their imagery each minute while their EEG activity was classified into five stages using Hori's criteria. The content of the imagery shifted predictably as the EEG progressed through these stages, indicating a close link between subjective experience and measurable brain states during the transition to sleep.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
April 1, 1999
Michael Schredl
Dream content scales show almost no nonlinear relationship with dream length; controlling only for linear components introduces negligible bias.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
August 1, 1997
M A Persinger
Among university students surveyed over 15 years, about 7% said they would kill if God commanded it, a proportion that remained stable across years. Men were slightly more likely than women to answer yes. For men who attended church weekly, reported a religious experience, and showed elevated signs resembling complex partial epilepsy—5.7% of all males—44% said they would kill if God told them to.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1997
Michael Schredl, Evelyn Doll
Learning and practicing Autogenic Training, a relaxation technique, enhances dream recall. This conclusion comes from analyzing 112 participants across 16 beginner courses lasting 10 weeks.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
August 1, 1996
A Lequerica
Lucid dreams and nonlucid dreams share many of the same characteristics, with lucid dreams representing one end of a continuum of self-reflectiveness and cognitive features present in all dreams. The authors describe a simple model illustrating the mind-body relationship across various forms of REM dreaming, suggesting that studying lucid dreams can contribute to understanding dreaming in general rather than being a misguided path.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
October 1, 1995
James A. Prescott, C. Gary Pettigrew
Among 17 middle-school students, a greater desire for control over waking-life situations was associated with more frequent lucid dreams.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
August 1, 1995
M Schredl, S Frauscher, A Shendi
Correlations among dream recall frequency, dream report length, and visual memory were estimated for 50 subjects. The previously observed relationship between dream recall frequency and visual memory was confirmed, but visual memory did not influence the length of dream reports.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1995
S Sakata, J Shinohara, T Hori et al.
Floating in a sensory isolation tank increases randomness in orally generated number sequences, while lying on a bed in an isolation box decreases it. Seven student volunteers each completed one 40-minute session on a bed and two 40-minute sessions floating in a tank. Continuous polygraph recordings of EEG, EOG, ECG, and respiration showed that flotation induced more hypnagogic (drowsy) and light sleep states than the bed condition. The authors suggest that these states enhanced random generation.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1995
J Conesa
Over 23.5 months, a single subject who has experienced isolated sleep paralysis for 24 years recorded dream recall in a diary. Geomagnetic activity data from two observatories were correlated with the diary entries. Periods of relatively quiet geomagnetic activity were significantly associated with a higher incidence of sleep paralysis episodes. The report also examined lucid dreaming, vivid dreams, and total dream frequency in relation to geomagnetic activity, but the main finding links quiet geomagnetic conditions to increased sleep paralysis.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1994
M Schredl
People with higher verbal creativity scores tend to report shorter dreams. In a study of 32 participants who completed a verbal creativity test and kept a dream diary for two weeks, those with high creativity scores reported significantly shorter dreams. The finding suggests that factors such as visual memory may influence the length of dream reports.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
February 1, 1994
Joseph H. Pearl, Alfred F. Carlozzi
Meditation reduced anxiety but did not change empathy. A group that practiced Clinically Standardized Meditation for 8 weeks reported lower anxiety compared to a no-treatment control group, while empathy levels remained unchanged.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1992
H T Hunt, A Gervais, S Shearing-Johns et al.
A new questionnaire measures adults' recall of childhood and adolescent transpersonal experiences—mystical, out-of-body, lucid dreams, archetypal dreams, and ESP—alongside nightmares and night terrors. In two exploratory studies, adults with high estimated early transpersonal experiences and practicing meditators were compared with undergraduate controls. A cognitive skills/precocity model and a vulnerability of self model were tested using questionnaire categories, imaginative absorption, neuroticism, and visual-spatial skills. Results suggest support for both models, depending on the type of experience, the age of recall, and whether the adult meditates.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1991
J Montangero
A method is proposed for defining the sequential organization of reported dreams, using categories of connection between successive events and a schematic representation of the event sequence. The analysis is based on segmenting the dream report into semiotic units, not linguistic ones, and relies on material collected in an interview the day after the dream recording. Examples show that semantic links connect successive scenes that appear completely discontinuous from a narrative point of view.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
April 1, 1991
M A Persinger
People who report having a religious experience before adolescence show more frequent and varied signs of temporal lobe activity in adulthood. Among 868 university psychology students surveyed over 10 years, the 19% who reported such an early experience also more often reported depersonalization, belief in psi phenomena, sensations of presence, sensitivity to odors, widened affect, childhood imaginary playmates, and left-handedness. These individuals were also more likely to experience confusion of boundaries between themselves, other people, and cosmic forces. The findings suggest that an earlier onset of temporal lobe transients may facilitate a broader range of temporal lobe signs later in life.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1990
G Gillespie
Drawing on personal observation, the author describes features of hypnopompic visual imagery—images seen upon waking—that illuminate how internal visual images are experienced. This understanding explains how a two-dimensional internal perceptual image can be experienced as a three-dimensional external environment surrounding the observer. The author suggests how this three-dimensionalized perceptual image is constructed, how it creates the effect of directional looking within a wide field of view, and how certain features of visual perception are best accounted for by the mediation of perception through an internal image.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1989
Ross Levin
Undergraduates with frequent nightmares scored lower on ego strength than those with few nightmares, but nightmare frequency was unrelated to death anxiety. A negative correlation between death anxiety and ego strength appeared in women, especially those with many nightmares, where the correlation reached -.83. Nightmare frequency may mediate the link between ego strength, death anxiety, and sex.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
October 1, 1989
Raymond F. Martinetti
Women recall more dreams and report richer imaginal lives than men, except for suppression of feelings, where no difference appears. In a sample of 45 women and 45 men matched on age, family income, and college GPA, women scored higher on dream recall frequency, degree of imaginal life, and orientation toward imaginal life. The findings indicate continuity between waking and sleeping imaginal processes. Sex differences are attributed to cultural and attitudinal factors, and the authors predict that as sex-role stereotypes diminish, sex differences in dream recall and imaginal processes will also decrease.