Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 2025
Michael Schredl, Anja S. Göritz
The basic definition of lucid dreaming is that the dreamer knows that s/he is dreaming while still dreaming. However, the skills within the lucid dream, e.g., regarding dream control, vary considerably from dreamer to dreamer. The present study tested the psychometric properties of the Lucid Dreaming Skills Questionnaire (LUSK) in a sample of 1267 persons. The findings indicate that the LUSK...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 2025
Amedeo D’Angiulli, Kiranpreet K Sidhu
It is often challenging to fully justify why it is preferable to think and conduct research about consciousness following a particular theory as opposed to another. This may be especially true in disciplines within Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience which may be pressured to follow radical reductionism to physics or chemistry. The present approach was developed through teaching a...
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 showed large inter-individual differences that are partly related to personality dimensions. However, as dream research is a small field, independent studies are necessary to build a solid empirical foundation. The present online survey included 1,537 participants (1150 women, 387 men) with a mean age of 35.1 ± 15.8 years. Whereas the...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
April 20, 2022
Michael Schredl, Judith Zumstein, Sven Baumann et al.
Previous research identified personality and neurophysiological traits that are associated with inter-individual differences in lucid dreaming frequency. The present study investigated the question as to whether sensory processing sensitivity is related to lucid dreaming. Overall, 1,807 persons (1,008 woman, 799 men) with a mean age of 47.75 ± 14.41 years completed the German High Sensitive...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 17, 2020
Michael Schredl
A variety of factors contribute to nightmare distress; in addition to nightmare frequency also beliefs about nightmares can be associated with heightened nightmare distress. The study investigated the personality correlates of beliefs about nightmares and whether these beliefs mediate the relationship between gender, neuroticism, and nightmare distress. Overall, 1214 persons (716 women, 498...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
March 25, 2019
Michael Schredl, Anja S. Göritz
A fascinating area of dream research is the analysis of long dream series. However, research regarding differences between long-term journalists and normal persons is lacking. The present online survey (N = 2,492) focused on the relationship between the Big Five personality dimensions and frequency of recording dreams. As expected, dream recall frequency, nightmare frequency, and attitude...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 2018
Michael Schredl, Alina Noveski
Most studies looking into the relationship between lucid dream frequency and personality were based on questionnaire measures of lucid dream frequency. Thus, the aim was to investigate the effect of keeping a dream diary on lucid dream frequency and the correlates of the frequency of lucid dreams in the diary with the Big Five personality factors. The study included 1,612 dreams reported by 425...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 2016
Michael Schredl, Josie Henley-Einion, Mark Blagrove
Although dreams are very private experiences, they are often shared with others. The findings of the present study ( N = 1,375) indicate that sharing dreams is indeed very common and that dream sharing frequency is related to gender (only in adolescents, with girls sharing dreams more often than boys), extraversion, dream recall frequency, and nightmare frequency. Future studies should study...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 2014
Caroline L. Horton
This investigation aimed to characterize the personality profile of dream-recallers using a psychometrically-validated measure of dream remembering (the MED-Q) (Horton & Conway, 2009), and considered these relationships in terms of confabulation: the tendency to confuse reality with imaginings and thus create false memories. In Experiment 1, 221 participants completed the MED-Q and a battery of...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 2009
Michael Schredl
Dream recall is naturally a prerequisite for eliciting dream content. Therefore it is of importance to study factors (e.g., personality traits) that might affect dream recall because these factors might bias the content analytic findings in the field of dream research. The present findings indicate that different aspects of dream recall (dream recall frequency, dream recall detail, long-term...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 2008
Ephrem G. Pano, Michelle C. Hilscher, Gerald C. Cupchik
Eighty-nine students from the University of Toronto completed a 20-item self-consciousness questionnaire. They also provided a written account of a self-conscious (e.g., embarrassing) episode from everyday life as well as a self-conscious episode from a dream. Factor analysis of the questionnaire responses revealed 6 factors, with public and private self-consciousness emerging as the dominant...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 2007
Carlos S. Alvarado, Nancy L. Zingrone
Previous questionnaire studies of parapsychological experiences have found significant interrelations between the experiences in question and dream experiences. In this study we present a replication of these relationships using a nationality of participants neglected in previous studies, a predominantly Spanish sample. A questionnaire was published in a Spanish New Age magazine. Four hundred...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 2007
Robert Tartz, Richard C. Baker, Stanley Krippner
This study investigated if dream content differences exist between male and female dreamers in England. One most recent dream report was collected from each of the 100 male and 100 female research participants during dream seminars and a dream research project held in England between 1990 and 2004. The Hall-Van de Castle System of Content Analysis (1966) was used to score each dream report....
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 2005
Thomas Natsoulas
I continue to address W. James's intentions in his article of 1904 titled “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” (DCE), and to raise critical questions concerning the direction his theory takes after The Principles of Psychology. Here, as in the preceding article of this series, I closely examine his article for what it tells us concerning his new conception of the stream of consciousness. James holds...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 2005
James B. Worthen, Sarah A. Eisenstein, Siobhan C. Budwey et al.
Interpretation of research investigating the content of dreams within the context of sleep studies is complicated by memory-related factors. The present study offers a controlled experiment using wakeful participants to test two main hypotheses that have implications for sleep studies: 1) that the bizarre content of dream reports is more memorable than the common content and 2) that dream...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 2003
Thomas Natsoulas
I address W. James's intentions in “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” (DCE), and raise critical questions about the direction his theory takes after The Principles of Psychology. My article starts with consideration of a few of James's later statements on what he was trying to do in DCE, and then I closely examine his article for what it tells us concerning his new conception of the consciousness...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 2002
Thomas Natsoulas
Weiskrantz's recent account of awareness is considered from a perspective that James bequeathed us. In opposition to the Intellectualists, James asks why a pure ego wielding purely conceptualizing acts is needed to give us awareness of relations and universals, inter alia. In opposition to Weiskrantz's Intellectualism, I ask how a commentary system, which has at its disposal only conceptual...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 2002
Michael Schredl
The results of the present study confirmed earlier findings of heightened dream recall frequency in women. The variables “meaningfulness of dreams” and “occurrence of problem-solving dreams” significantly reduced the correlation coefficient between gender and dream recall frequency. However, the question of causality remains unsolved. Other variables such as emotional intensity of dreams or...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
September 1, 2002
Thomas Natsoulas
This article, published in two parts, is propaedeutic to a consideration next of Weiskrantz's conception of consciousness from a perspective bequeathed to us by James more than a century ago. Weiskrantz has argued in support of a general account of awareness that resembles the “Intellectualist” notion of mind against which James strongly objected. Weiskrantz mainly addressed the question of...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 2002
Thomas Natsoulas
This two-part article is propaedeutic to considering subsequently Weiskrantz's “commentary” conception of consciousness: from the perspective that James bequeathed to us more than a century ago. Weiskrantz has sought to render plausible a general account of awareness that resembles the “Intellectualist” notion of mind to which James had objected in The Principles. Whereas the central problem he...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
March 1, 2002
Thomas Natsoulas
James presented a number of compelling arguments against those theorists whom he called the “Intellectualists”: a) for holding that mental states of the mundane Jamesian qualitative kind cannot provide us with our awareness of relations; and b) for introducing purely conceptualizing mental acts to do the job from on high. In his classic account of mental life, James found no use for purely...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
March 1, 2002
Stanley L. Brodsky, Nancy L. Ryba
It has often been asserted that the drawing of one's dreams will aid in producing more vivid, more interpretable, and clearer dream content. However, the literature on using dream drawings to enhance interpretation and meaningfulness has been limited to descriptive and narrative accounts. This study compared the recorded dreams of 69 participants who were asked to either write, write then draw,...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
October 1, 2001
Ross Levin, Gary Fireman
The present study prospectively investigated the relationship between nightmare prevalence, nightmare distress, and waking imaginative involvement. One hundred and sixteen individuals completed self-report indices of fantasy proneness, psychological absorption, and daydreaming as well as a sleep and dreaming questionnaire and a nightmare distress measure. Participants then kept a dreaming and...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
June 1, 2001
Thomas Natsoulas
James distinguished the states of consciousness that successively constitute a stream of consciousness from how they appear to inner awareness. For one thing, the stream has a discrete temporal structure whereas its basic durational components inwardly seem continuous, each with the next one: partly because the stream never abruptly changes in all of the features of its content. States of...
Imagination, Cognition and Personality
March 1, 2001
Thomas Natsoulas
The feeling aspect that, according to James, every state of consciousness possesses—what is it and what is its function? From a previous article, I continue here an effort to spell out how the feeling aspect and a cognitive aspect—which, too, was proposed to characterize all pulses of mentality—belong together to a single integral whole. Every state of consciousness is both a feeling and a...