e. , emotions)Understanding symbolic meaningThese models feature nonlinear, nonlocal, nonstationary mathematics developed incrementally over the past 65 years, primarily by Stephen Grossberg. URT is comprehensively described in Grossberg's 2021 monograph Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain (CMRB), the reference for all assertions in this reply unless otherwise specified. URT is complex. CMRB is more...
Over the past decades, reductive materialism has made a recipe for philosophy of mind to explore the subtle nature of the human mind. By and large, many identity theorists were likely to argue that mental states can be found in cognitive faculties of the brain so that the mind, if not most, associates with discoverable phenomena with no burden of proof. To put this bluntly, reductive...
Abstract Although gender differences in the dreams of adults have been studied extensively, large-scale studies in children and adolescents are scarce. The UK Library Study collected 1,995 most recent dreams of children and adolescents. Boys reported more physical aggression and fewer female characters in their dreams, whereas indoor settings were more prominent in girls’ dreams, results that...
Abstract This study demonstrates that different methods for measuring emotional experiences in dreams—self-ratings of dreams using emotion rating scales versus external ratings in the form of content analysis of narrative dream reports—can lead to strikingly different results and contradicting conclusions about the emotional content of home dreams. During 3 consecutive weeks, every morning upon...
It has been claimed that dreams are the royal road to the unconscious mind. The present work argues that dreams and associated brain states such as memory, attention, flow, and perhaps even consciousness itself arise from diverse conflicts over control of time in the brain. Dreams are the brain's offline efforts to distill projections of the future, while memory represents the vestiges of the...
In lucid dreams the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming. Although such dreams are not that uncommon, many aspects of lucid dream phenomenology are still unclear. An online survey was conducted to gather data about lucid dream origination, duration, active or passive participation in the dream, planned actions for lucid dreams, and other phenomenological aspects. Among the 684...
A recent meta-analysis showed a robust gender difference in nightmare frequency of medium effect size in adolescents and young adults: Women tend to report nightmares more frequently than men. The present study, carried out in an unselected student sample, indicates that 2 factors mediate the gender difference in nightmare frequency: neuroticism and overall dream recall frequency. The effect of...
Dream books have a very long history, but systematic research on how many people have read magazine articles or books on dreams and whether reading such literature is beneficial to the dreamer is scarce. In the present sample of 444 people (mostly psychology students), about 75% of the participants stated that they had read at least one magazine article on dreams, and more than 40% had read at...
Although dreaming is a private experience, dream sharing is a common experience for most people. Dreams are disclosed to romantic partners, friends, and relatives, and the sharing is often associated with enhancement of relational intimacy and stress relief (e.g., in the case of nightmares). Research has focused on factors that might affect dream sharing such as dream recall frequency, gender,...
Understanding dreams has long been considered fundamental to the development of a theory of consciousness. Evidence from neurobiology and neuroimaging research has paved the way for new theories of dreaming that are empirically supported. In this article we argue that dreaming is a unique state of consciousness that incorporates 3 temporal dimensions: experience of the present, processing of...
The recently proposed threat simulation theory (TST) states that dreaming about threatening events has a biological function. In the past few years, the TST has led to several dream content analysis studies that empirically test the theory. The predictions of the TST have been investigated mainly with a new content analysis system, the Dream Threat Scale (DTS), a method developed for...
William Domhoff's The Scientific Study of Dreams breaks new ground in the field, not by proposing grandiose, premature answers to questions about the nature of dreams but rather by showing us with unprecedented clarity and scope where we have erred in the past and allowing us to start over again. In a careful, reasoned critique, Domhoff demonstrates the shortcomings of the dominant dream...
Of the states that constitute William James's stream of consciousness, many are or include perceptual mental acts. These states present to consciousness one or more of their environmental objects themselves, as distinct from a mere internal representation of the latter. That is, a feature of the contents of such states is that their objects have phenomenological perceptual presence....
Upon nighttime experimental awakening of 27 subjects in four sleep conditions (sleep onset early; sleep onset late; Stage 2; and rapid eye movement, REM, sleep), 108 dream reports and their association reports were collected. Dream reports were analyzed for length (temporal units) and content categories (continuity; implausibility; presence of the dreamer [i.e., "the self"], a setting,...
The present study investigated the relationship between cognitive laterality and dream recall, dream characteristics, and eye movement density in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Fifty-two right-handed males, age 20-30 years, were tested on a six-test battery of which three tests measure right hemisphere function and three tests measure left hemisphere function. Based on their performance, 14...