We pilot tested the efficacy of a virtual reality-based imagery rehearsal and rescripting treatment (ReScript) for nightmares. Nineteen community volunteers (Mage = 49 years) who varied in terms of their nightmare distress levels participated in a 4-week-long trial of ReScript therapy. Participants used VR manual controls in an Oculus headset to manipulate 3 scary or threatening images per...
Vipassana meditation is characterized by observing bodily sensations, developing emotional and attentional stability, and promoting prosocial qualities. Whether these characteristics are also reflected in meditators’ dream content is not currently known. Evidence relating dream content with sleep-dependent learning is mixed: Some studies suggest that dreaming of a task is beneficial for...
Previous research on an efficacious cognitive-behavioral treatment for posttrauma nightmares and sleep disturbances (exposure, relaxation, and rescripting therapy; ERRT) has not tested the treatment in individuals with bipolar disorder. However, research suggests that individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder are at increased risk for trauma exposure and development of posttrauma symptoms....
Chinese and Canadian people answered surveys in their native languages about their self-construal, media use history, and dreaming experiences. This included reporting a recent dream. The nightmare protection thesis was investigated. Sex was found to be modulated by culture in terms of the relationship between types of media used and negative dream content. This was particularly evident for men...
In a lucid dream, the dreamer knows that he or she is dreaming and can thus deliberately carry out actions. The original goal of this study was to investigate musical practice in lucid dreams and its possible effects as well as the quality of the experiences. A total of 5 musicians were interviewed about their lucid dreams in which they had played instruments and sung. However, the interviewees...
Research has found that high thought suppressors dream more of their emotional waking-life experiences than low suppressors, in line with the dream rebound effect. The present study replicated and extended this finding. Participants (N=62) completed the White Bear Suppression Inventory (WBSI), the Pittsberg Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), the Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Scale (DASS21), and...
Lucid dreaming is a learnable skill and has a wide range of potential applications. However, research in this area has been limited by a lack of effective and reliable lucid dream induction techniques. The present study provides a thorough investigation into 3 of the most promising cognitive lucid d
This study asked the question, “Are there significant content differences between male and female dream reports obtained in dream seminars conducted in Japan?” Each of the 100 female and 100 male research participants contributed 1 recent dream report during dream seminars that were held in Japan be
This article reports an investigation of two proposed theories, the predispositional and experiential, regarding the association of personality variables to lucid dreaming incidence during a 12-week lucid dreaming induction programme. The study found no differences between those who did and did not report lucid dreams during the programme on baseline measures of Field Independence, Locus of...
DreamingMarch 1, 2016Kevin Dionisio Hochard, Nadja Heym, Ellen Townsend5 citations
Frequent nightmares have been linked to daily distress using self-report measures. The present study investigated the impact of frequent nightmares on a stressful cognitive test requiring participants to perform additions of 2 previously displayed single digit numbers from a number series, where display latency between digits becomes increasingly short—the Paced Visual Serial Addition...
Chapter 9 proposes a conceptual framework for describing instances of thinking, self-reflection, and metacognition in dreams and analyzes their relationship to insight and control in lucid dreams. It also discusses the question of whether dreams involve beliefs. A preliminary result is that existing hypotheses that cast dreaming as a state of cognitive deficiency in which the phenomenology of...
The chapter confronts the epistemological problem of dream deception with evidence of scientific dream research with the aim of investigating the empirical plausibility of different scenarios of dream deception. I argue that a majority of dreams do not fulfill the conditions for counting as deceptive experiences in any interesting sense. At the same time, a number of real-world candidates for...
Shamanism is a worldwide social phenomenon consisting of a set of practices (e.g., ritualistic drumming, sensory deprivation, the ingestion of entheogens and dream incubation) designed to obtain knowledge from alternative realities for the purpose of benefiting one's social group. The aim of this paper is to provide a cross-cultural exploration of dreaming in the context of shamanism. We...
The study investigated aspects of dream sharing and dream recall in an adult sample (N = 667). It explored with whom dreams are shared and why, as well as the relation between relationship intimacy and dream sharing frequency with the partner. A significant, positive correlation was found between dream sharing frequency in couples and perceived relationship intimacy. Further, the findings...
Soldiers who play video games to varying degrees were solicited to fill out a survey on dreams and gaming. A prescreening filtered out those who were not soldiers, who did not game and who were suffering from various psychological problems in the last six months. The remaining soldiers filled out these inventories; general and military demographics, history of video game play, Emotional...
Increasing evidence supports the clinical view that alexithymia is associated with disturbed dreaming. However, a consistent, replicable pattern of relationships between alexithymia and different dreaming components has not yet been identified. Groups of sleep-disordered outpatients (N 580; 46.0 13.2 years) and nonclinical controls (N 145; 22.9 4.2 years) were administered the Toronto...
DreamingJune 1, 2010Umberto Barcaro, Pietro Rizzi4 citations
The objective of the research was to recognize and describe a phenomenon of self-similarity in dreams, specifically in the connection patterns of dreams: These patterns were obtained by means of a linguistic analysis of data including dream reports and associations provided by the dreamer. Dreams of four patients in therapy, three for each patient, were considered. It was found that a...
Lucid dreams, as well as control dreams, have recently been reported as associated with video game play (Gackenbach, 2006). In this study, dreams were collected from the morning after a night of rested sleep as well as electronic media use from the day before the dream. In a factor analysis, lucid and control dreams were associated with all electronic media use but most strongly with video game...
The authors hypothesized that representations of the Self (or the dreamer) in dreams would change systematically, from a prereflective form of Self to more complex forms, as a function of both age and sleep state (REM vs. non-REM). These hypotheses were partially confirmed. While the authors found that all the self-concept-related dream content indexes derived from the Hall/Van de Castle dream...
The main goal of the present study was to explore electrophysiologicaldifferences between lucid and nonlucid dreams in REM sleep. Seven men andfour women experienced in lucid dreaming underwent polysomnographicrecordings in the sleep laboratory on two consecutive nights. EEG signalswere subjected to spectral analysis to obtain Þve different frequency bandsbetween 1 and 20 Hz. Lucidity was...
Previous research in the field of lucid dreams has contained descriptions of several techniques for inducing lucid dreams, but there have been only a limited number of empirical studies designed to evaluate the effectiveness of these techniques. The present study investigated the effects of a two week training program using the reflectionintention technique which is specifically designed to...
Exposure, abreaction, and mastery have been proposed as the therapeutic processes of nightmare (NM) reduction. Imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT) effectively reduces NMs but involves minimal exposure and abreaction. The authors investigated the use of mastery in the scripting of new dreams (NDs) elaborated during IRT. NM an dN D reports were collected from 44 female sexual assault survivors with...
A. Revonsuo (2000b) proposed an evolutionary theory of dreaming, stating it is a threat simulation mechanism that allowed early humans to rehearse threat perception and avoidance without biological cost. The present study aimed to establish the proportion of dreams containing physical threats to the dreamer, whether these represent realistic life-threatening events, and whether the dreamer...
Anthropological ethnographies sometimes postulate that new religious ideas may originate in individual dreams, visions, or madness. An illustration is given of the foundation of the Earth People of Trinidad, for whom dreams may still contain prophetic insight or knowledge. Their oneiric understandings have to be placed against their cultural baseline of village dream theory and the dreamlike...
The question whether personality dimensions explain the interindividual differences in dream recall frequency has often been investigated by dream researchers. The present findings confirm previous research which has shown that traits such as openness-to-experience and thin boundaries correlate substantially with dream recall frequency. However, correlation coefficients are small and are much...