Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 1999
Andrzej Kokoszka
9 citations
A questionnaire survey of 295 adolescents and adults distinguished two types of altered states of consciousness. Superficially Altered States (SACS) involve disturbances in reality perception, self-awareness, and cognition, often occurring in everyday life, solitude, or during poor well-being. Profoundly Altered States (PASC) involve experiences related to the absolute, universal, eternal, or existential and religious matters, accompanied by extremely strong positive emotions and significantly fewer cognitive disturbances than SACS. PASC occur mainly in religious contexts. The findings suggest these two categories represent qualitatively different experiences.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
December 1, 2022
Michael Schredl, Anellka Remedios, Silvia Marin-Dragu et al.
8 citations
Dream recall frequency and lucid dream frequency vary widely among individuals and are partly linked to personality traits. An online survey of 1,537 participants (1,150 women, 387 men; mean age 35.1 years) confirmed that openness to experience is associated with higher dream recall, supporting the lifestyle hypothesis. However, associations between the Big Five personality factors and lucid dream frequency were less consistent; for example, neuroticism showed a negative relationship with lucid dream frequency. Effect sizes were small. Lucid dream frequency was related to COVID-19-related worries, while dream recall frequency was not.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
March 1, 1993
Andrzej Kokoszka
8 citations
Waking altered states of consciousness (ASC) are common among Polish university students. In a survey of 174 students, 96 percent reported experiencing Superficially Altered States of Consciousness (SACS), often with positive, pleasant feelings and quietness, while 75 percent reported Profoundly Altered States of Consciousness (PASC), accompanied by extremely strong positive emotions and experiences related to absolute, universal, or existential matters. SACS occur in everyday situations, whereas PASC arise mainly in religious or natural contexts. The findings support an integrated model of consciousness suggesting a natural, cyclical occurrence of differentiated waking states.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 2025
Michael Schredl, Anja S. Göritz
The Lucid Dreaming Skills Questionnaire (LUSK) reliably measures differences in people's ability to control their dreams while lucid. A study of 1,267 people found the questionnaire valid. In a subset of 374 people tested again after seven years, LUSK scores were less stable than how often people reported having lucid dreams. Those who actively practiced lucid dreaming over the seven years showed a greater increase in lucid dream frequency than those who did not, suggesting that lucid dream induction can succeed outside formal research settings.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 2025
Amedeo D’Angiulli, Kiranpreet K Sidhu
A novel philosophical framework called functionalist emergentist materialism (FEM) resolves longstanding theoretical disputes about consciousness by integrating major philosophical traditions. Developed through teaching approximately 2000 students over fifteen years, FEM treats the "hard problem" of consciousness as an evolutionary solution rather than an intractable puzzle. The approach aligns with Damasio's tripartite theory of consciousness and yields a pragmatic test for recognizing when an organism is conscious. FEM is presented as compatible with contemporary evolutionary thinking and current scientific standards, offering a way to justify preferring one theory of consciousness over another without resorting to radical reductionism.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
April 20, 2022
M. Schredl, Judith Zumstein, Sven Baumann et al.
Aesthetic sensitivity and a low sensory threshold, two facets of sensory processing sensitivity, are positively associated with how often people experience lucid dreams. Extraversion and low agreeableness also correlate with more frequent lucid dreaming. These effects are small. The findings come from a survey of 1,807 German adults who completed personality and lucid-dream-frequency questionnaires.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 17, 2020
M. Schredl
Nightmare distress is influenced not only by how often nightmares occur but also by what people believe about them. In a survey of 1,214 adults (716 women, 498 men), beliefs about nightmares were linked to neuroticism and openness to experience. Regression analysis showed that beliefs about nightmares, gender, neuroticism, and agreeableness each independently contributed to nightmare distress, even after accounting for nightmare frequency. The findings suggest that psycho-education about modern etiological models of nightmares might reduce distress.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
March 25, 2019
M. Schredl, A. Göritz
People who frequently record their dreams tend to recall dreams more often, have more nightmares, and hold more positive attitudes toward dreams. Unexpectedly, conscientiousness was negatively linked to dream recording, a finding that needs further investigation. The roles of education and agreeableness in dream recording also remain unclear. These individual differences suggest caution is warranted when generalizing findings from long dream series to the broader population.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 2018
Michael Schredl, Alina Noveski
Lucid dreams are quite rare, occurring in only 1.36% of dreams in an unselected student sample. Keeping a dream diary over two weeks produced a lower frequency of lucid dreams than retrospective estimates. A negative association between lucid dream frequency and agreeableness was previously reported, and a new finding shows a negative correlation with neuroticism. Many lucid dreams did not include dream control. The authors suggest further study of personality, especially neuroticism and agreeableness, in relation to lucid dreaming.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 2016
Michael Schredl, Josie Henley-Einion, Mark Blagrove
Sharing dreams with others is very common. Among 1,375 participants, the frequency of dream sharing is linked to gender in adolescents (girls share more often than boys), extraversion, how often people recall their dreams, and how often they have nightmares. The authors suggest future research should examine with whom dreams are shared and whether sharing dreams has beneficial effects.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 2014
Caroline L. Horton
People who often remember their dreams tend to be more open, have thinner psychological boundaries, and are prone to fantasy, according to two experiments. In the first experiment with 221 participants, these personality traits correlated with dream recall as measured by a validated questionnaire. A second experiment with 45 participants showed that the tendency to confabulate—confusing imagination with reality and creating false memories—was linked to awareness of dreaming, but not to other memory scores. This suggests that dream recall reflects a constructive, autobiographical memory process prone to error, rather than accurate memory, and warns that freely recalled dreams should be interpreted with caution.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 2009
Michael Schredl
Dream recall is necessary for studying dream content, so factors like personality traits that influence recall may bias dream research findings. Different aspects of recall—frequency, detail, and long-term memory—are affected by different factors or to different degrees by the same factor, such as imagination. Whether these variables confound content analyses that use different sampling methods (most recent dreams, diary dreams, or laboratory dreams) is not well understood. The results indicate a clear need for systematic research to improve the representativeness of dream content findings.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 2007
Carlos S. Alvarado, Nancy L. Zingrone
People who report parapsychological experiences also tend to recall their dreams more often and have more lucid dreams. A questionnaire published in a Spanish New Age magazine received 492 responses, mostly from Spanish participants. Most parapsychological experiences correlated positively with each other and with dream recall and lucid dream frequency. These results support the idea that a disposition such as boundary thinness, dissociation, or fantasy proneness may make some individuals more open to having or believing they have had seemingly parapsychological experiences.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 2007
Robert Tartz, Richard C. Baker, Stanley Krippner
Men in England reported dreams with a higher ratio of aggression to friendliness than women did, while women reported more physical aggression and a higher percentage of bodily misfortunes in their dreams. Some findings matched past American studies, but others were unique to this English sample, possibly due to the participants being dream seminar attendees or reflecting cultural patterns.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 2005
Thomas Natsoulas
James argues that consciousness is not a substance but is constituted of 'pure experiences' that are neither mental nor physical but can be taken as either. A key feature is direct acquaintance with one's experiences, which forms the basis of all knowledge. For example, knowledge of the sun arises from taking certain experiences as that physical object, due to their context among other experiences that are also objects of inner awareness.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 2003
Thomas Natsoulas
William James's later theory of consciousness, presented in his article 'Does Consciousness Exist?', reconceives the stream of consciousness as composed of 'pure experiences' that are neither mental nor physical but can be taken as either. A key feature is direct acquaintance with one's own experiences, which grounds all knowledge. For example, knowing the sun involves directly experiencing certain phenomena and, within a context of other inner experiences, interpreting some of those experiences as the physical sun itself. The article examines James's own statements about his intentions and closely analyzes his new conception.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 2002
Michael Schredl
Women report remembering their dreams more often than men. The connection between gender and dream recall is partly explained by how meaningful people find their dreams and whether they report having problem-solving dreams. Emotional intensity of dreams and nightmare frequency do not substantially affect this gender difference. The reasons for the difference remain unclear, and future work should test factors like attitude toward dreams and examine how the difference develops in childhood and adolescence.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 2000
Thomas Natsoulas
Blindsight, a neurological condition caused by visual-cortical lesions, can be interpreted through William James's conception of the stream of consciousness as presented in The Principles of Psychology. This Jamesian interpretation assigns no role to unconscious mental occurrences; instead, the deficiency of blindsight lies in the total brain process producing states of consciousness whose intrinsic visual-perceptual dimension is inaccessible or unreliably accessible to immediate apprehension. The author elaborates this interpretation to clarify the kind of conception of consciousness James was developing, despite disagreeing with some of its theses.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 1998
Barbara L. Easterlin, Etzel Cardeña
Advanced Buddhist mindfulness meditators report greater self-awareness, positive mood, and acceptance compared to beginners. Over five days of electronic paging and experience sampling, stress lowered mood and self-acceptance in both groups, but the harmful effect of stress on acceptance was stronger for beginners. The findings validate in everyday life some effects described in traditional Buddhist texts on mindfulness.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 1998
Antonio Zadra, Shannon A. O'Brien, D. C. Donderi
Recurrent dreamers aged 18 to 21 scored lower on psychological well-being and reported more negative dream content compared to past-recurrent and nonrecurrent dreamers. A single psychometric dimension, psychological well-being, distinguished recurrent dreamers from the other groups across all well-being and dream content measures. Dream archetypality was negatively correlated with neuroticism, matching two prior studies. The findings suggest that recurrent dreams occur during stressful periods, involve negative content, and are linked to reduced psychological well-being.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 1996
Thomas Natsoulas
This philosophical paper examines the relationship between consciousness and self-awareness through the lens of William James's "The Principles of Psychology." It clarifies different senses of consciousness and explores James's concept of personal consciousness, particularly how the durational components of a stream of consciousness cohere without spatial location, given James's mind-body dualism. The author argues that continuities of content, especially bodily feelings intrinsic to each component, unify the stream. The diachronic unity of consciousness heavily relies on self-awareness. The paper also addresses inner awareness—immediate awareness of one's own mental occurrences—and questions whether remembering past experiences requires both inner awareness at the time of occurrence and self-awareness.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 1995
Thomas Natsoulas
William James's concept of 'ejective consciousness' holds that in altered states, mental events can split off from a person's main stream of consciousness to form a second, equally conscious and personal stream. Unlike nonconscious mental occurrences, which James argues cannot exist because they lack inner awareness, this second stream has its own inner awareness of its basic durational components. The original stream can only know the second stream indirectly, through inference, and the same applies in reverse. James thus distinguishes between split-off conscious streams and the nonconscious mental, which he rejects.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 1995
Peter L. Nelson
The Tellegen Absorption Scale, widely used to measure personality Trait Absorption, may not adequately distinguish true capacity for absorption or the opportunity for absorptive experiences. This study adds Capacity and Opportunity subscales to the scale and uses Principal Components Analysis to generate five useful sub-dimensions. Building on the author's earlier suggestion linking Trait Absorption to cannabis use and depression, an exploratory study examined how cannabis use, gender, self-perceived motivation loss, and depression relate to overall Absorption, Capacity, and Opportunity.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 1995
Thomas Natsoulas
This philosophical article examines William James's concept of "ejective" consciousness from his work The Principles of Psychology. James proposes that during altered states, and possibly at other times, mental occurrences can split off from an individual's primary stream of consciousness, forming a second stream that is equally conscious and personal. While James rejects the existence of nonconscious mental occurrences that lack inner awareness, he accepts that a second stream of consciousness can exist alongside the first. Each stream has inner awareness of its own durational components, but can only have inferential knowledge of the other stream.
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 1994
Peter L. Nelson
The so-called cannabis "amotivation syndrome" may not be a single disorder but instead a change in cognitive style arising from cannabis's ability to facilitate a unique attentional state favored by individuals with higher levels of the personality trait "absorption." When this absorptive cognitive style is exaggerated through cannabis use in the context of pre-existing or reactive depression, it may be mistakenly categorized as amotivational syndrome.