Editorial: Understanding conscious experiences during sleep
Adriana Michalak, Claudia Picard-Deland, Giulio Bernardi, Mohamed S. Ameen
Frontiers in Sleep October 12, 2026 DOI: 10.3389/frsle.2026.1985086 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Editorial Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Describes a Research Topic collection on sleep-related subjective experience, from hypnagogic imagery to lucid dreaming. The editors identify four contributions: challenges of studying dreaming in clinical populations, boundaries of altered states of consciousness, computational dream report analysis, and dream engineering. |
Abstract
The sleeping brain hosts a spectrum of subjective experiences, ranging from fleeting hypnagogic images and simple thoughts to vivid, full-fledged dreams and lucid dreaming. The works published in this Research Topic present novel methodological and conceptual approaches to studying these experiences. Contributions span the challenges of studying dreaming in clinical populations (Fischmann et al. , 2025), considerations around the boundaries of altered states of consciousness (Weiler et al. , 2025), computational dream report analysis (Bertolini et al. , 2025), and dream engineering (Haar Horowitz et al. , 2026).