December 31, 2017Min Jae Seong, A. Jung, Hea Ree Park et al.
Min Jae Seong, A-reum Jung, Hea Ree Park, Su Jung Choi, Eun Yeon Joo Department of Neurology, Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Seoul, Department of Nursing, Samsung Medical Center, Department of Clinical Nursing Science, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Seoul, Department of Neurology, Brain-Nerve Center, Samsung Medical Center, Samsung Biomedical...
Research has demonstrated the health benefits of a wide range of spiritual practices such as meditation and prayer, and similar nonspiritual practices like mindfulness. Shamanism is a spiritual practice that uses dream recall during ecstatic trances, and scientific research has shown health benefits of dream recall. Researchers have long realized the importance of intrapersonal communication...
A recent study reported that individuals recalling frequent idiopathic nightmares (NM) produced more perseveration errors on a verbal fluency task than did control participants (CTL), while not differing in overall verbal fluency. Elevated scores on perseveration errors, an index of executive dysfunction, suggest a cognitive inhibitory control deficit in NM participants. The present study...
Study Objectives: This study used ambulatory polysomnography (PSG) to investigate post-traumatic nightmares of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The key research question was whether post-traumatic nightmares occur in both rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM sleep, and if so, whether nightmares in each sleep stage differed in content, phenomenology, and heart rate response. Underlying...
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...
Author's précis of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, including the author's response to commentators.
Sleep disturbances are often referred to as a hallmark and as core symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Untreated sleep disturbances can contribute to the maintenance and exacerbation of PTSD symptoms, which may diminish treatment response and constitute a risk factor for poor treatment outcome. Controlled trials on treatment of sleep disturbances in refugees suffering from PTSD...
In order to further our understanding about the limits of human consciousness and the dream state, we report meta-analytic results on experimental dream-ESP studies for the period 1966 to 2016. Dream-ESP can be defined as a form of extra-sensory perception (ESP) in which a dreaming perceiver ostensibly gains information about a randomly selected target without using the normal sensory...
Sleep problems are recognized as widespread in patients with psychosis. Other facts are known as well – that not only can psychiatric illness result in sleep problems, but that these same problems can exacerbate psychopathology and that they constitute risk factors for suicide. Sleep difficulties are known to respond well to appropriate treatment and yet, with the exception of insomnia, sleep...
Les théories récentes de la conscience incarnée (embodiment) soulignent que l'esprit est un processus incarné, impliquant le cerveau, le corps et l'environnement. Plusieurs aspects de la cognition, de l’interaction sensorimotrice avec l’environnement à la pensée abstraite et métaphorique, ont été conceptualisés dans ce paradigme. Le sommeil et le rêve, cependant, ont rarement été abordés par...
Background: Research studies on sleep medicine and disorders using Arab participants are limited, particularly the relationship between nightmares and psychopathology. Cross-cultural studies may help to better understand this association.
Research on nightmares has largely focused on the nightmare itself and its associated negative consequences, framing nightmare sufferers as victims of a diathesis-stress induced form of psychopathology. However, there is evidence that frequent nightmare recallers are sensitive to a wide range of sensory and emotional experiences, and report vivid, bizarre and even intensely positive dream and...
Objective: Nightmares are among the most frequent and disturbing symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, basic research questions regarding key associations between certain nightmare characteristics, especially replicativeness, and posttraumatic psychopathology need further empirical elaboration. Method: Sixty-two German soldiers (mean age 33.8 years, 17.7% females) admitted...
This chapter reports on the themes and process of a conference organized by Thomas Kohut and the author through the Erikson Institute at the Austen Riggs Center. The title of the conference was “The Legacy of Perpetrator Trauma in Groups and Families” as experienced by descendants of Nazis, generations not guilty in deed but affected by powerful feelings of guilt, shame, and horror by...
Recent advances in electrophysiological [e.g., surface high-density electroencephalographic (hd-EEG) and intracranial recordings], video-polysomnography (video-PSG), transcranial stimulation and neuroimaging techniques allow more in-depth and more accurate investigation of the neural correlates of dreaming in healthy individuals and in patients with brain-damage, neurodegenerative diseases,...
Where do our dreams originate from, and what do they tell us? Is there a universal set of symbols that are common to all dreams, regardless of a person's ethnicity or culture? What does dreaming reveal about the unconscious? Why do some dreams remain etched in our memories, whereas others are almost instantly forgotten? Some scientists have adopted the position that dreams are little more than...
We are at least as dream deprived as we are sleep deprived. Many of the health concerns attributed to sleep loss result from a silent epidemic of REM sleep deprivation. REM/dream loss is an unrecognized public health hazard that silently wreaks havoc with our lives, contributing to illness, depression, and an erosion of consciousness. This paper compiles data about the causes and extent of...
This article describes the future prospects of scientific dream research. Three frontiers of investigation hold special promise: neuroscientific studies of the brain-mind system's activities during sleep (such as during lucid dreaming); systematic analyses of large collections of dream reports from diverse populations of people; and psychotherapeutic explorations of the multiple dimensions of...
Nightmares have been shown to be robust predictors of self-harm risk, beyond depressive symptoms and hopelessness at times. However, few studies have investigated associations between nightmare content and increased self-harm risk. This study explored associations of thematic nightmare content with history of self-harm, and risk of self-harm phenomena the morning following a nightmare. A...
This chapter provides the most detailed critical analysis yet developed of the neurophysiological theory of dreaming called activation-synthesis theory, a bottom-up theory that rejects a top-down neurocognitive approach because rigorous studies of dream content allegedly cannot be carried out, especially on the basis of dream reports collected in the sleep lab. This theory suggests that dreams...