Lucid dreaming is a rare phenomenon, therefore different induction techniques are used to increase the lucid dream frequency. In the present study three cognitive methods were tested: Dream diary, Wake-up-back-to-Bed, and reality testing/reflection. Altogether, 110 participants completed the three-week study protocol. The present findings showed that although the overall effects were not...
A group of 18 experienced lucid dreamers responded to a 27-item online questionnaire pertaining to their use of the supplement galantamine for the purpose of inducing dreams. The questionnaire included 14 items that assessed the perceived differences on dimensions of dream phenomenology between lucid dreams immediately preceded by the ingestion of galantamine, and lucid dreams that were not....
Connecting dreams with somatic illness has a long tradition; e. g., physicians like Hippocrates or Galen used dreams for diagnosing and curing illnesses. The present study investigated the relationship between illness, health-related worries, and health-related dreams in a sample of 178 persons. The findings indicate that having a minor illness and especially health-related worries increased...
Studies investigating the prevalence of nightmares have generally found higher frequencies in studies using daily logbooks or diaries compared to retrospective reports, raising the question as to whether retrospective questionnaires lead to an underestimation of nightmare frequency, possibly due to the suppression of the frightening nightmare experience or if the diary enhances recall. In this...
Despite positive results from the use of dreams in psychotherapy and for personal growth, research regarding the relationship between waking life and dreams of patients with mental disorders is relatively scarce. The present paper reviews the existing literature on dreams of psychiatric patients in order to identify the continuities and discontinuities between the dreams and the waking life...
There have been many studies which show that waking life is mirrored in dream content. In a previous study, the relation between time spent on sports related tasks and sport dreams has been shown where that sports students dream more often of sports than psychology students. In this study the aim was to test whether this trend is also true for students of politics and if the time spent in...
The analysis of this long dream series (N = 9133 dreams) indicates that smoking plays a role in the dreams (1.43%) of a non-smoker. Most often, other dream characters were smoking which annoyed the dreamer. The medium success rate of doing something about the smoking probably reflects a basic pattern of the dreamer dealing with annoying situations. The present study is a good starting point to...
Nightmares are defined as dreams with strong negative emotions that result in awakening. Overall, the findings of the present representative survey (N = 915) indicate that nightmare frequency decrease with age and living in urban areas are associated with heightened nightmare frequency. Longitudinal studies are needed to clarify how age affects nightmare frequency because the findings of...
The percentages of successful dream recall vary depending on whether the participants were awakened from REM sleep (about 80% recall) or NREM sleep (about 50% recall). The question as to whether this difference is explained by less dreaming during NREM sleep or sleep state-dependent memory processes cannot answered easily. The present pilot study was designed to test whether high recallers can...
Using a mixed methods approach, this study investigates whether the content of dreams reported by 7 to 8 year olds differs significantly from those of 9 to 11 year olds. Nineteen children in the south west of England completed dream diaries at home for 14 days. The data were coded using Hall and Van de Castle’s (1966) Dream Content Analysis. The results demonstrate that despite a small sample...
The results of a web-survey aimed at analyzing the phenomenology of False Awakenings (FAs) (sleep-related experiences in which the subjects erroneously believe that they have woken up, only to discover subsequently that the apparent awakening was part of a dream) were revised in light of Hobson’s recent dream protoconsciousness theory. A web-questionnaire had been previously submitted to three...
The notions of continuity and discontinuity are discussed in relation to the phenomenon of lucid dreaming (awareness of dreaming while dreaming). Lucid dreams seem to be more dreamlike than non-lucid dreams both in terms of their content and REM sleep physiology and therefore are more discontinuous with our waking experience. They also seem to represent some “crack” – discontinuity – in the...
The interference hypothesis (Cohen, 1974; Cohen & Wolfe, 1973) was proposed to account for the difficulties in remembering dreams. Stimuli perceived on waking can either encourage activation of the waking brain or impair the transition from sleep to wake. The objective of the present study was to assess the validity of the interference hypothesis by discriminating between the natural decay of...