Perceptual and Motor Skills
April 1, 1989
P Tholey
In lucid dreams, dream characters can perform complex cognitive tasks such as drawing, writing, naming unknown words, finding rhymes, making verses, and solving arithmetic problems, though arithmetic performance was poor. Nine male experienced lucid dreamers instructed dream characters to complete these tasks, and some succeeded. These findings do not contradict the idea that dream characters have consciousness in a specific sense. The authors conclude that in lucid dream therapy, communication with dream characters should be treated as if they were rational beings. Psychophysiological experiments could further investigate whether dream characters possess consciousness.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
April 1, 1989
H Hunt
George Gillespie's observations on light and lattice imageries connect to current research on cognitive imagery, ordinary and lucid dreaming, geometric imagery in science, altered states of consciousness, and Gibson's perception theories. His reports reveal categories of imagery deconstruction and abstraction that bridge these fields and point toward an integrative model of symbolic imagery varieties.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
April 1, 1989
G Gillespie
The author describes personal observations of persistent bright lights that appear during lucid dreams and upon waking (hypnopompic states). These lights—such as areas of light, disks, or sun-like concentrations—remain fixed in the visual field regardless of dreamed body movements and recur in the same locations across different dreams. Unlike ordinary dream images, they are not representational. The author notes that hypnopompic geometrical patterns, though appearing dome-like, are actually experienced as two-dimensional and flat. This flatness, the author argues, applies to all internal images, which the mind then translates to external positions around the eyes.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
February 1, 1988
Paul R. Robbins, Roland H. Tanck
Among 123 undergraduates, those who often speculated about their dreams or held theories about dream meaning were somewhat less likely to report nights without dream recall over a 10-day diary period. Women were more likely than men to speculate about and discuss their dreams.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1987
S Jakes, D R Hemsley
Personality traits, particularly psychoticism, are linked to hallucinatory experiences in the general population. A predisposition to hallucinations is also associated with vivid imagery experienced during the transition between wakefulness and sleep (hypnagogic and hypnopompic states). The findings suggest that certain personality dimensions may influence the likelihood of reporting such unusual perceptual experiences in people without diagnosed psychiatric conditions.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1986
Michael C. Dillbeck, Panayotis D. Assimakis, Dennis Raimondi et al.
College students who practiced the Transcendental Meditation and TM-Sidhi program showed significant increases in cognitive ability and cognitive style over a 3- to 5-year period, as measured by the Culture Fair Intelligence Test and Group Embedded Figures Test. The findings suggest that these practices contribute to improved cognitive effectiveness, consistent with prior research in educational settings.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1985
Harry T. Hunt
A previously developed cognitive theory of mystical and altered states is extended. The theory holds that these states directly exteriorize normally hidden processes of semantics or 'felt meaning.' The human ability to 'turn around on the schemata' for symbolic recombination is based on cross-modal or synaesthetic embodiment of geometric and luminosity patterns afforded by disassembling visual-spatial perception. Orthodox accounts that treat synaesthesias and geometric imagery as primitive or nonsymbolic are rejected. This reinterpretation offers new understanding of ordinary insight, body-percept changes in schizophrenia, yoga chakra experience, and the mystical void. The psychology of thought and of altered states mutually illuminate each other.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
April 1, 1985
Raymond F. Martinetti
The relationship between dream recall and cognitive and imaginal factors was examined in 222 students. Those who recalled more dreams also reported richer imaginal lives and scored higher on a test of short-term memory. Orientation toward imaginal life was particularly strong among high dream recallers. Defensiveness did not appear to explain differences in dream recall. The findings suggest that dream recall may be improved by strengthening short-term memory and by engaging in activities that foster imagination, such as introspection, daydreaming, and meditation.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1984
Zack Zdenek Cernovsky
Attitudes toward dreams are only weakly linked to how often people remember their dreams, and unrelated to how often they recall nightmares. Among 46 part-time college students, a 16-item inventory measuring dream attitudes showed a small correlation (r = .31) with self-reported dream recall frequency over the previous six months. No relationship was found between dream attitudes and nightmare recall frequency.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
February 1, 1984
Michael A. Persinger
Brief, seizure-like electrical activity confined to the temporal lobe, without convulsions, may underlie religious experiences. Two cases illustrate this: a Transcendental Meditation teacher showed a 10-second delta-wave seizure in the temporal lobe during a peak meditation experience, and a Pentecostal speaker had temporal-lobe spikes during prolonged glossolalia. Neither subject had psychiatric history. These observations suggest religious experiences are natural correlates of temporal lobe transients detectable by routine EEG.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1983
Paul Tholey
Systematic observations in lucid dreams can test hypotheses about the link between dream content and eye movements. Five students who learned to induce lucid dreams using a reflection technique made observations that allowed several hypotheses about this relationship to be rejected.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
February 1, 1982
Keith M. T. Hearne
People who have lucid dreams (awareness of dreaming) often find it difficult to turn on an electric light in the dream scenery, suggesting a ceiling on imagery brightness. Attempts to violate this level lead to rationalized avoidance. Nine subjects who tried to switch on other electrical appliances also had difficulties. A lack of coordination between imagery modalities was noted, with a substitution effect observed in three cases where auditory imagery was absent—subjects automatically sang or made noise. Four of six subjects who closed their eyes in a lucid dream experienced a scene shift; one had the dream re-run; one experienced sleep paralysis. These consistencies challenge traditional dream interpretation approaches.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
April 1, 1978
L. R. T. Williams
A comparison of 32 experienced Transcendental Meditators and 32 non-meditators found that the claimed benefits of Transcendental Meditation, such as increased alertness, sustained attention, greater consistency, and reduced anxiety, did not translate into better learning or performance of a new perceptual-motor skill. The practice showed no advantage in this specific task.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
August 1, 1977
Bernhard Haller
A computer system retrieves dream reports in response to questions by using a large thesaurus of semantic relations, avoiding manual coding. For a given question word, the system automatically finds dreams containing related words (synonyms, subnotions) and prints them. Four examples illustrate the method, and limitations from linguistic difficulties are discussed.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
April 1, 1973
Steven Starker
The study examined whether autokinetic perception—a visual illusion where a stationary point of light appears to move—relates to inner experiences such as daydreaming, dream recall, and psychological differentiation. Results showed little correlational support for the hypothesized connection between autokinesis and these aspects of inner life. Factor analysis revealed that autokinetic perception was independent of other measures. The authors replicated previously reported styles of daydreaming and noted some qualitative similarities between waking fantasies and dream content.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
August 1, 1972
John M. Taub
Dream recall and content were compared between 10 female college students who habitually slept more than 9 hours per night and 7 who slept less than 6.5 hours per night. Over two weeks, the short sleepers reported 81 dreams and the long sleepers reported 114 dreams. Among nine dream content variables, the two groups differed significantly on only one, and they did not significantly differ in how often they recalled dreams. The authors suggest that sleep length itself may be relatively unimportant for dream reports and dream reporting in homogeneous groups of long and short sleepers, and other personality characteristics may matter more.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1972
David B. Cohen
Three studies indicate that reports of having no dream content and reports of having no dream at all are distinct phenomena, not a single category of nonrecall. Distributions of these two types of reports differed across menstrual cycle phases, across three consecutive nights of recording, and with total sleep time. The authors suggest that researchers should separate contentless and dreamless reports in future work.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
April 1, 1972
David B. Cohen
Longer total sleep time predicts more dream recall for men, but not significantly for women, though the trend is in the same direction. This confirms earlier findings that total sleep time is important for men's dream recall and suggests that the factors determining dream recall may differ between sexes.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
December 1, 1971
David B. Cohen
Psychological traits like anxiety, repression, and cognitive style show little to no connection with how often or how much people remember their dreams, unlike psychophysiological factors such as sleep stage and auditory arousal thresholds. Two studies found no evidence for a link between dream recall and short-term memory for verbal or visual material. These results align with the general lack of strong, empirically supported relationships between personality variables and dream recall frequency.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
October 1, 1971
Paul R. Robbins, Roland H. Tanck
A study of college students found no relationship between three MMPI personality scales (A, R, and Es) and the ability to recall and report dreams. Two groups of students were asked to produce written dream reports over several weeks, and those who did were compared with those who did not on the three scales. The results were not statistically significant, failing to confirm earlier research that had suggested such a link.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
October 1, 1971
Frank H. Farley, Joseph Schmuller, Thomas J. Fischbach
Dream recall was not related to extraversion-introversion or neuroticism among university students. Female students reported significantly higher average dream recall than male students across three hypothetical recall periods. The authors suggest that future research should examine motivational factors, especially physiological arousal during dreams, and propose several theoretical possibilities.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
June 1, 1970
John M. Taub
Extended sleep leads to more dream recall and dreams that are more closely tied to waking life. In two studies with 22 participants, people reported significantly more dreams after sleeping longer than after a normal 8-hour night. The dreams after extended sleep also contained a greater proportion of familiar characters, suggesting they relate more to daily experiences.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
October 1, 1969
Robert Watson, Allan Rechtschaffen
Earlier research had shown that people with lower auditory awakening thresholds (AATs) reported more dreams when awakened from non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. In this study of four participants over several nights, no relationship was found between Stage 2 NREM dreaming and within-subject, within-night variations in AAT. Subjectively 'deep' Stage 2 sleep was associated with high AATs and with reports of Stage 2 dreaming. AATs declined over successive nights of laboratory sleep. Earlier findings of similar AATs for REM and Stage 2 sleep, a decrease in AAT with time of night, and no relationship between AAT and time since last awakening were confirmed. Stage 2 awakenings close together in time yielded more reports with similar manifest content.
Perceptual and Motor Skills
October 1, 1966
J. Antrobus, J. Singer, S. Greenberg
A model links spontaneous cognitive events like daydreams to ongoing responses to external stimuli. In experiments using a simple signal-detection task under partial sensory deprivation, faster signal presentation or higher short-term memory demands significantly reduced reports of task-irrelevant thoughts and imagery. Graded financial rewards for accurate detection progressively decreased extraneous fantasies. Distressing information given before trials significantly increased reports of spontaneous daydreaming during the detection task.