Dream recall has been investigated via various means, often relying upon self-report judgments. Such methods, as well as individual differences and cognitive correlates of dream recall, rarely acknowledge models, theory, or empirical work concerning waking memory. Study 1 presents the development and psychometric validation of the Memory Experiences and Dreaming Questionnaire (MED-Q)—a 30-item...
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...
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...
The present study investigated the effects of socio-demographic variables on dream content in a representative sample. The analyses of 380 most recent dreams showed that almost none of the socio-demographic variables like age, gender, marital status, education, income, nor town (or city) of residence size was significantly related to general dream characteristics like dream length, bizarreness,...
Despite the fact that flying unaided is not possible in waking life, flying dreams have been reported fairly often. Over the centuries, a large number of scientists have speculated about the etiology of such dreams. Their occurrence in a student sample ( N = 444) was related to low neuroticism, openness to experience, boundary thinness, dream recall frequency and playing an instrument. The...
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...
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....
Past research shows there are more similarities than differences in the dream content of college students in several industrialized democracies. This study uses new results from dreams collected in Germany to support this past finding and suggest that dreams are more similar than different because they dramatize people's conceptions and concerns in relation to personal issues, which probably do...
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...
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...
Phenomenological evidence for olfactory sensation in the absence of appropriate stimulation—imagery—is inconclusive and draws most support from reports of olfactory hallucinations. The current study examined whether more convincing phenomenological evidence could be obtained from normal participants, by studying reports of their olfactory dreams. A questionnaire approach ( N = 284) revealed...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
The purpose of this study was to provide information about experiences obtained by illegal drug users and evaluate if these are consistent with Stanislav Grof's expanded model of the human unconscious. Sixteen anonymous former drug users answered a questionnaire about use, experiences, circumstances, and influences of their life. All of them have had some experiences similar to Grof's...
Blindsight research provides an opportunity to place James's account of consciousness in an empirical context that is attracting much comment from psychologists. Recently, I briefly indicated some lines along which the neurological phenomenon of blindsight—which results from visual-cortical lesions—is interpretable in keeping with James's conception of the stream in The Principles of...
Superficially Altered States of Consciousness (SACS) and Profoundly Altered States of Consciousness (PASC) are described as a result of analyses of results of a questionnaire survey of 295 subjects—adolescents and adults. The comparison of the experiences accompanying these states indicates that SASC are characterized by disturbances in experiencing the reality, one's self, and in cognitive...
This article develops the concluding section of a previous article of mine, which briefly contrasted William James's views on consciousness in The Principles with those of Susanne K. Langer in her own magnum opus. This comparative approach allows me to bring out vividly the fact that James's discussion of consciousness seeks to express a non-egological conception of the subject matter. James...