In sports practice a well-established method is mental practice which is, for example, applied in elite sports to intensify practice and to offer additional practice sessions when opportunities for physical practice are limited (Erlacher, 2007). It is also used on other areas, such as surgery and music. There is a special way of mentally rehearsing movements without physical activity: in our...
Lucid dreams – dreams in which the dreamer is aware that is dreaming – most frequently occur during REM sleep, yet there is some evidence suggesting that lucid dreaming can occur during NREM sleep as well. By conducting a sleep laboratory study on lucid dreams, we found two possible instances of lucidity during NREM sleep which are reported here. While lucid dreaming during NREM sleep seems to...
In a lucid dream the dreamer is aware of the dream state and can influence the dream content and events. The goal of this study was to investigate some applications of lucid dreaming. Our survey included 301 lucid dreamers who filled out an online questionnaire. The most frequent application (81.4%) was having fun, followed by changing a bad dream or nightmare into a pleasant one (63.8%),...
The study of higher-order cognition in dreaming was guided by the question “What are the scope and purpose of thinking/strategizing efforts as one of three previously identified direct mental problem-solving modalities (Kozmová, 2008; 2012) that some dreamers are capable of using to resolve the novelties of felt-need situations encountered during non-lucid dreaming?” The research utilized...
Even though the relationship between nightmare and dissociation is investigated in western populations with mental illness, relevant dream studies in non-patient Chinese population, and about specific type of nightmares, are completely lacking. According to continuity hypothesis of dreaming, nightmares reflect the negative emotion, mental conditions, and symptomatology of waking life. The...
This study extended previous research by comparing dream content and discovery passages from the dreams of Canadian and Italian patients who were undergoing psychodynamically-oriented psychotherapy. Thirty Italians and 30 Canadians (17 males and 13 females) completed The Storytelling Method of Dream Interpretation in either Italian or English. Dream and discovery content was analyzed via the...
The discussion between J. Allan Hobson and Michael Schredl covers a broad variety of topics that are still“hot” in dream research. The starting point is the continuity hypothesis of dreaming which is complemented by AllanHobson’s theory of protoconsciousness. Whereas there is no disagreement that waking life is reflected in dreams, thediscussion evolves around discontinuity, i.e., how dream...
Since the discovery of REM-sleep, modern empirical dream research has made considerable advances in making dreaming a subject of scientific interest. To allow for quantification and interpretation of dream material, it is necessary that at first the dreamer him or herself is able to reach an optimal notion of the experienced dream. This means predominantly seeing and memorizing dream imagery....
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...
Both historical accounts and modern research suggest that dreams may contribute to creativity and problem solving, however no research has been done to investigate creative problem solving in lucid dreams – in which the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming. This pilot and exploratory study explored the feasibility of such research. It was also hypothesised that dream characters might...
Dream content analysis is one of the basic methods applied in psychological dream research. The method can be easily applied but several pitfalls must be avoided in order to get valid results. The present article outlines how to construct new scales and the problems related to reliability and validity of content analytic scales. In addition, statistical issues prominent in the analysis of dream...
A considerable amount of studies have shown that sleep facilitates memory consolidation. For procedural memory, some findings support the association with REM sleep but the relationship between memory consolidation and dreaming has been scarcely studied. The present study did not find an effect of direct incorporations of the mirror tracing task into the dream on over-night improvement. On the...
Researchers present evidence in support of a model of consciousness that includes lucid dreaming, witnessing/transcendental consciousness during dreaming and witnessing/transcendental consciousness during deep sleep. Due to the potential for confusion between subjective reports of lucid dreaming and witnessing dreaming or witnessing sleep the authors suggest researchers screen for them all. The...
In the last two decades considerable progress in brain imaging techniques have led to increasing interest into the neurobiology of sleep stages and dream contents. However, this fascinating research field poses several methodological challenges. The aim of this article is to discuss these challenges and to suggest novel approaches for probing the neurobiology of dream contents. Most of all, I...
The potential significance and stimulus of color in dreams was postulated from a content analysis of color in spontaneously recalled dream reports. The analysis was performed on 15,245 dream reports in the DreamBank.net database, plus 12,841dream reports from long-term dream journals. One objective was to determine, to the degree possible from content analysis, whether dream color reports...
Research has demonstrated stable gender differences in dream recall and dream content. Previous matching studies using student samples showed that the judges were able to correctly match the dreamer’s gender based on a single dream report with a probability better than chance. Using dream reports from a non-student sample only slightly increased the accuracy of matching gender despite the fact...
A question about déjà rêve (already dreamt, a form of déjà experience) was included in a large "sleep, dreams, and personality" survey of 444 (mainly psychology) students at three German universities. The incidence of déjà rêve was high (95.2%) and, like most other déjà experiences, was negatively correlated with age. In addition to dream recall frequency, the most influential personality...
Varying research perspectives of the conceptual distinction between physiology and subjective experience, and the outside vs. inside perspective on dreaming will be discussed. Whereas the AIM model is helpful in describing the neurobiological differences between states of consciousness, research is needed to test whether specific features of the subjective experience like bizarreness or...
Hobson (2009) proposes that lucid dreaming can become simultaneously and separately manifest against a background of non-lucid dreaming. The study of such state conjunctions, he suggests, sets the stage for a revolution in the neuroscience of consciousness. However, while lucid dreaming may indeed represent the emergence of what Edelman (2004) calls secondary consciousness amidst the primary...
The International Journal of Dream Research is reaching its third year. The two issues of 2009 included 13 original papers and one invited essay. These articles covered a large variety of topics like lucid dreaming, dream recall, dream content, nightmares, dreams and psychopathology, and sleep quality. Submissions from all over the world including Canada, the United States of America, the...
This article reviews the dissertation of Wilhelm Weygandt that was supervised by Wilhelm Wundt. The claim of the author that all dreams emanate from sensory impression is not valid anymore; nevertheless the careful observations and experiments yielded interesting results which should be studied in-depth using modern methodology, for example, the effect of internal stimuli on dream content.
Neurobiologists and cognitive scientists are engaged in new efforts to establish the brain basis of consciousness. Progress in brain imaging and in quantitative EEG recording in humans and in unit recording in animals have all contributed to this progress. But progress has been limited by the relative poverty of the paradigms used in these studies, many of which do not take subjective...
The present study investigated the nightmare frequency of patients with insomnia. Patients reported more often nightmares, especially when overall dream recall frequency was statistically controlled. Moreover, nightmare frequency was related to the severity of insomnia complaints. It would be interesting to study whether specific techniques for treating nightmares (imagery rehearsal therapy)...