Consciousness never fades during waking. However, when awakened from sleep, we sometimes recall dreams and sometimes recall no experiences. Traditionally, dreaming has been identified with rapid eye-movement (REM) sleep, characterized by wake-like, globally 'activated', high-frequency electroencephalographic activity. However, dreaming also occurs in non-REM (NREM) sleep, characterized by...
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with cognitive deficits in attention, executive control, and memory, although few studies have investigated the relevance of cognitive difficulties for treatment outcomes. We examined whether cognitive functioning and history of traumatic brain injury (TBI) were associated with response to cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for PTSD-related...
This essay represents an extended version of my comments presented at the 2016 American Sociological Association (ASA) Annual Meetings town hall held in Seattle, Washington. I offer my thanks to Professor Aldon Morris for his gracious invitation to serve as a panelist on this important topic. This opportunity cracked open the door and allowed some of us to provide our thoughts on the myriad...
Nightmares are intensive dreams with negative emotional tone. Frequent nightmares can pose a serious clinical problem and in 2001, Tanskanen et al. found that nightmares increase the risk of suicide. However, the dataset used by these authors included war veterans in whom nightmare frequency - and possibly also suicide risk - is elevated. Therefore, re-examination of the association between...
Both rapid eye movement (REM) sleep dreaming and non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep spindles have been linked to processes of memory consolidation. However, relationships between the two phenomena have yet to be explored. In a heterogeneous sample of 53 healthy subjects who had participated in a memory consolidation protocol and who varied in their self-reported recall of dreams and...
Lucid dreaming frequency varies strongly among individuals and, thus, research has focused on identifying what factors affect this phenomenon. The present study, an online survey ( N = 2,492), focused on the relationship between the Big Five personality dimensions and lucid dreaming frequency. Additionally, the personality correlates of the age of the first lucid dream were investigated. In our...
Varenicline (VCL) treatment has become popular as a part of smoking-cessation therapies, even though its possible implications in neuropsychiatric adverse events include abnormal sleep and nightmares. Our study is the first aimed at prospectively investigating changes in sleep and dream measures across such treatment by using a one week sleep diary and collecting dream recall (DR). Thirty-eight...
Nightmare frequency in adult ADHD patients has not yet been studied systematically. In a sample of 65 patients, it could be shown that nightmare frequency was elevated in ADHD patients compared to a sample representative for Germany. Frequent nightmares (once a week or more often) were reported by 4.62 % of the patients and 1.77 % of the controls. This increase was neither explained by the...
Dream research has advanced considerably since the discovery of REM sleep. However, despite the progress made and the existence of various theories of dreaming, the neuroanatomical origins underlying dream recall remains a controversial topic. This may have been due to a lack of suitable tools to effectively test such theories. There is now, however, a diverse range of noninvasive brain...
On the basis of four historical and ethnographic case studies of modeling in neuroscience laboratories, this chapter introduces a distinction between transparent and opaque models. A transparent model is a simplified representation of a real world phenomenon. If it is not patently clear, it is at least much better comprehended than its objects of representation. An opaque model, by contrast,...
Did Luke intend Peters visionary command to eat unclean animals in Acts 10 to suggest the dissolution of the Jewish Law? John Moxon shows how, by the incorporation of anxiety dream motifs from Graeco-Roman biography, Luke takes revelation in a decidedly psychological direction, opening up a striking new reading of this controversial passage.
Sleep and dreaming are important daily phenomena that are receiving growing attention from both the scientific and the philosophical field. The increasingly popular predictive brain framework within cognitive science aims to give a full account of all aspects of cognition. The aim of this paper is to critically assess the theoretical advantages of Predictive Processing (PP, as proposed by Clark...
I have been a synesthete all my life and thought I understood my synesthetic perceptions rather well when, suddenly, in 2013, I began to see a new kind of internal image: hypnagogic visions. These visions, a normal state of consciousness, are known to occur somewhere between wakefulness and sleep. They appeared to me as another source of photisms, in addition to my usual synesthetic...
Nightmares are associated with psychopathology and impaired coping in the general population. However, little is known about this association in a psychiatric population. In this study, we investigate whether patients with diverse psychiatric disorders have increased symptomatology and different coping styles if they suffer from comorbid nightmare disorder. Participants were 498 patients with...
Nightmares are typically extended, elaborate dream narratives, and usually occur during rapid eye movement period of sleep.Nightmare experience is accompanied by the disturbed affect culminating in arousal, which usually involves an individual's efforts to avoid threats to survival, security, or physical integrity, but often results in awakening with rapid orientation and alertness...
High dream recallers (HR) show a larger brain reactivity to auditory stimuli during wakefulness and sleep as compared to low dream recallers (LR) and also more intra-sleep wakefulness (ISW), but no other modification of the sleep macrostructure. To further understand the possible causal link between brain responses, ISW and dream recall, we investigated the sleep microstructure of HR and LR,...
Cannabinoids are derivatives that are either compounds occurring naturally in the plant, Cannabis sativa or synthetic analogs of these molecules. The first and most widely investigated of the cannabinoids is Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (Δ9-THC), which is the main psychotropic constituent of cannabis and undergoes significant binding to cannabinoid receptors. These cannabinoid receptors are...
Nightly transitions into sleep are usually uneventful and transpire in the blink of an eye. But in the laboratory these transitions afford a unique view of how experience is transformed from the perceptually grounded consciousness of wakefulness to the hallucinatory simulations of dreaming. The present review considers imagery in the sleep-onset transition-"microdreams" in particular-as an...