The climate crisis is arguably one of today’s greatest challenges and the Buddhist doctrine offers a foundation for a comprehensive approach to environmental activism, grounded in core principles such as mindfulness, compassion, and dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda). Consequently, many Buddhists have turned to environmental activism, trying to find their own ways of expression. This...
Lucid dreaming refers to a dream state in which the dreamers are aware that they are dreaming and may be able to intentionally influence the dream content. Previous studies have shown that lucid dreaming provides a useful model for investigating cognitive processes during dreaming and may also have potential therapeutic applications. However, reliable methods for inducing lucid dreams are still...
The continuity hypothesis of dreaming states that dreams reflect waking life, however, research has also shown that dreams can affect waking life, e.g., creativity, daytime mood. So far, factors that are associated with the effect of dreams on waking life have been rarely studied. Overall, 2492 persons (1437 woman, 1055 men) with a mean age of 47.75 ± 14.41 years participated in the study. The...
While the parallels between humor and dreams were already noted by Sigmund Freud over a century ago, funny dreams remain largely overlooked in contemporary research. The present study aimed to assess the associations between funny dreams, various facets of humor, and dream characteristics, while also exploring how humor is expressed within the dream state. Data from 198 survey respondents...
Lucid dreaming (LD), sleep paralysis (SP), and false awakenings (FA) are liminal sleep phenomena that are often studied independently, despite evidence suggesting that they may arise from overlapping states of consciousness. Within Filipino cultural contexts, such experiences are frequently interpreted through folklore and superstition, such as bangungot, rather than through scientific or...
In this essay, dream reports of the author’s dream diary were probed for their temporal aspects regarding dream production and experience. Three different general inferences were drawn from the dream contents: (a) Dreams are produced and experienced in real-time. (b) Dreams are produced in advance, saved and experienced later. (c) Dreaming is constant, being aware of it is variable. There was...
Several measures eliciting nightmare frequency have been developed over the years. Most of the measures show sufficient reliability, but some studies are based on the four-point item of the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) measuring bad dream frequency – even though reliability data for this item have not been published. The present study included a sample of N = 277 participants...
This study examined how lucid dreaming (LD) can be used for fiction writing during an 8-week intervention with 29 writers of varied LD experience. Participants received LD induction training and drew on lucid, non-lucid, and hypnagogic/hypnopompic dreams to produce a short story. Quantitative analysis compared blind ratings of pre- and post-intervention short stories across five creativity...
Objective: Up to 40% of adults report poor sleep quality, yet research investigating the role of nightmares on sleep quality is limited. This study aimed to characterise the prevalence of disturbing dreams and nightmares and their relationship to poor sleep quality. Method: 439 adults (310 females, Mage=44.9 years) completed an online survey investigating sleep, dreams, nightmares, and mental...
In this paper, I will explore the Tibetan Buddhist practice of dream yoga as a means of improving mental well-being through lucid dreaming. It discusses the psychological and spiritual benefits, including emotional regulation, reduced nightmares, enhanced creativity, and some difficulties with maintaining lucidity and cultural considerations involved. Key questions addressed include- ‘In what...
The continuity hypothesis of dreaming postulates that dreams reflect waking life, e.g. preoccupations, experiences, thoughts; however, other topics like seasonal changes have been studied very rarely. A long dream series recorded between 1984 and 2015 (over 30 years) including 11,808 dreams showed that “cold” elements like snow, ice, and hail occurred less often over time and, thus, indicates...
Based on the continuity hypothesis of dreaming, we have studied the effects of quarantine/isolation on the dreams of Italian adolescents during the time of the Covid-19 pandemic. A sample of 235 subjects (73.2% girls; ages 12-18 years, M = 16.08, SD = 1.7) was involved. Participants were asked to complete the MADRE Questionnaire, as well as to report their Most Recent Dream by responding to...
Dream recall frequencies exhibit large inter-individual differences, ranging from recalling a dream almost every morning to recalling a dream almost never. Although dream recall has been conceptualized as a stable trait, longitudinal studies in this area are scarce. Within the framework of a complex study, 279 women (mean age: 31.76 ± 4.73 yrs.) completed a brief sleep questionnaire three times...
Most people experience lucid dreams (LDs), which are dreams in which the dreamer is conscious and able to perceive vivid perceptions. There are many ways to induce LDs, but their levels of efficiency are far from satisfactory. In this study, we analyze the efficiency of an LD method that was tested in commercial events with hundreds of groups over 12 years. The main feature of the method is...
The diagnosis of a nightmare disorder is based on clinically significant distress caused by the nightmares and, therefore, empirical research should focus on studying factors that affect nightmare distress in addition to nightmare frequency. Overall, 2056 persons (1212 woman, 844 men) completed the online survey. A reliable 6-item scale measuring beliefs about nightmares was developed. The...
We developed a dream content analysis system (DCAS) based on an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that was trained using a relatively large corpus of over 35,000 dreams. This sample of dreams were supplied by 424 female and 211 male users over 4 years who had posted them at the dream posting website and app Dreamboard.com. Building upon previous dream content ontologies developed by Hall,...
This article will discuss how the ‘enactive’ approach to cognition and psychological processes can help further clarifying and developing a more heuristic framework for the understanding of severe mental disorders, in this case, depression and schizophrenia. Furthermore, enactivismwill serve as a framework that comprehends depressions and schizophrenia as disorders that encompass three...
Dream recall ability can vary between and within individuals, dependent on a number of influencing factors, including personality dimensions, number of nocturnal awakenings, and attitudes towards dreaming. Only a few studies, however, consider the possible connection of dream recall ability to general waking memory ability, or the influence of being motivated to actively remember dreams. The...
Lucid dreaming is a unique state between dreaming sleep and waking, wherein one is aware of being in dream and able to control dream contents. The present study was aimed as a proof-of-concept to a previously proposed idea that combining a cognitive training protocol with auditory cue during sleep could cause effective lucid dreaming induction even among healthy participants who had no history...
Lucidity is a rare phenomenon, thus different induction techniques are used to increase the frequency of lucid dreaming. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of lucid dream induction (three different cognitive methods: Dream diary, Wake-up-back-to-Bed, and reality testing/reflection) on external rated lucidity, dream length, overall emotional tone, and bizarreness....
Mystical experiences and spiritual dreams have been studied to learn how to define them, who has them, and why. Rarely is the content taken seriously except as evidence of physical or psychological pathology, religious beliefs, or the influence of local culture. A challenge posed by spiritual dream content and mystical experiences in general, is that spiritual experiences refer exclusively to...
The phenomenon of lucid dreaming, in which an individual has the ability to be conscious and in control of his dreams, has attracted the public attention, especially in the era of internet and social media platforms. With its huge popularity, lucid dreaming triggered passionate individuals, particularly lucid dreamers, to spread their thoughts and experiences in lucid dreaming, and provide a...
Since around 2010, important changes occurred in research on the neural bases of dreaming. From the 1960s until the end of the century, most sleep physiologists and some dream researchers continued to adhere to the view that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep was the functional state of the brain concomitant to dreaming, in spite of numerous published findings falsifying that view. At the beginning...
The goal of the present study was to analyze the dreams of Arthur Schnitzler and explore the dream content for potential parallels or differences to what is known about his private life in order to test the continuity hypothesis of dreaming. In addition, Freud’s dream content was also analyzed in order to compare Freud’s and Schnitzler’s dreams. One hundred dream reports from Schnitzler and 34...
Past research has suggested that reflective awareness in dreams, as a broader concept for understanding the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, can be further differentiated into a five-factor model (i.e., lucid mindfulness, dual perspectives, depersonalization, intra-dream self-reflection, and willed appearances) (Lee, 2010; Lee & Kuiken, 2015). Past research has also indicated that two kinds of...