The following article is an exploration of supernal dreaming, a type of dream that engages the dreamer as a profound, participatory, and often revelatory event. Dream types are not well developed in dream research; this article contributes to the development of a more typological approach to dream analysis. Four dream types are presented and contextualized with reference to their metaphysical...
Dogs have been close human companions for millennia and one would expect-according to the continuity hypothesis of dreaming-that dogs are also quite common in dreams. Previous studies showed that the percentages of dreams that include dogs range from about 1.5% to 5%, but studies relating waking-life experiences with dogs with dreams about dogs have not been carried out. In total, 1695 persons...
Anecdotal evidence that lucid dreaming might contribute to mental and physical health has been widely reported in the literature. Empirical research, though, is scarce. A brief questionnaire eliciting self-perceived benefits of lucid dreaming on mental and physical health had been completed by 386 participants who had lucid dream experiences. About 90% of the participants reported some benefit...
Sci-fi has had a lot to say about dreaming over the years: film director Christopher Nolan, fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, anime director Satoshi Kon, and many others have explored the weird and wonderful world of dreams. Inception begins with the premise that it’s possible to enter someone’s dream and extract information from their mind. In the first experiment of its kind, a research team led...
Amaç: Uyku ile ilişkili bozukluklar ve kabuslar gibi hızlı göz hareketiuyku parasomnileri, miyokard infarktüslü (Mİ) hastalar gibi klinik popülasyonlarda yaşam kalitesi için tehdit edici faktörler arasındadır.Bu çalışma, Mİ hastalarında uyku ile ilişkili bozukluklar, rüya ile ilgili faktörler ve kabusların ilişkilerini araştırmak için yapıldı.Gereç ve Yöntem: Bu kesitsel çalışmada, İran'ın...
We used crowdsourcing (CS) to examine how COVID-19 lockdown affects the content of dreams and nightmares. The CS took place on the sixth week of the lockdown. Over the course of 1 week, 4,275 respondents (mean age 43, SD = 14 years) assessed their sleep, and 811 reported their dream content. Overall, respondents slept substantially more (54.2%) but reported an average increase of awakenings...
Dreams are experiences that occur during sleep, while we are disconnected from the environment. Thanks to recent progress in neuroimaging techniques, it is now becoming possible to relate dream features to specific patterns of brain activity. Some conditions occurring in patients with neurological disorders, such as lucid dreams and parasomnias, not only have diagnostic value, but also offer a...
arXiv Preprint ArchiveSeptember 29, 2020Yunshu Du, Garrett Warnell, Assefaw Gebremedhin et al.
preprint
Experience replay (ER) improves the data efficiency of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by allowing an agent to store and reuse its past experiences in a replay buffer. While many techniques have been proposed to enhance ER by biasing how experiences are sampled from the buffer, thus far they have not considered strategies for refreshing experiences inside the buffer. In this...
Propensity to have nightmares has been theorised in terms of diathesis-stress models, with this propensity being seen as negative or even pathological. In contrast, a recent model proposes that nightmare propensity is due to Differential Susceptibility to stimuli, where high susceptibility can be beneficial in positive environments but detrimental in negative environments. This susceptibility...
Lucid dreaming is a phenomenon that can be classified as altered state of consciousness. In the last years the scientific interest for it has grown exponentially. To understand how the research on this topic evolved during the time, bibliometric and network analyses were performed. The focus of the analysis was on: 1) papers; 2) authors; 3) countries and 4) collaborations. Scopus database was...
Abstract Aphantasia is a recently discovered disorder characterised by the total incapacity to generate visual forms of mental imagery. This paper proposes that aphantasia raises important theoretical concerns for the ongoing debate in the philosophy and science of consciousness over the nature of dreams. Recent studies of aphantasia and its neurobehavioral correlates reveal that the majority...
SleepSeptember 4, 2020R. Bottary, G. Simonelli, T. Cunningham et al.
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has dra-matically impacted the lifestyle of individuals across the globe. In many countries, nationally instituted shelter-in-place orders and closures of non-essential businesses have left many without employment and have forced others to work from home. These policy shifts have changed or removed the socially- and occupa-tionally imposed...
This study analyzes the responses of 3,031 U S adults who, in early May of 2020, completed an online survey regarding their dreams and the COVID-19 outbreak The results indicate that those people most strongly affected by the pandemic also reported the strongest effects on their dream life (heightened dream recall, more negatively toned dreams, and pandemic-related dreams) Pronounced negative...
Nightmares are prevalent in psychiatric disorders, and personality disorder features might be associated with nightmare experience, especially in nightmare disorder patients. The authors invited 219 healthy volunteers and 118 nightmare disorder patients to undergo tests of the Nightmare Experience Questionnaire (NEQ), the Parker Personality Measure (PERM), and the Plutchik-van Praag Depression...
Chronotype refers to individual differences in sleep timing ("owls" and "larks") and "eveningness" has been associated with nightmares. However, it has not been tested as to whether neuroticism mediates this relationship. Urbanicity refers to being raised in an urban region and/or currently living in an urban region and is associated with heightened risk for developing mental disorders, and...
Based on the continuity hypothesis of dreaming with waking life, we have studied the effects of isolation on the dreams of Italian persons, during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic The present study included a sample of 796 subjects (73 2% women;ages 18-79 years, M = 30 3, SD = 12 8) Participants were asked to complete a dream questionnaire, as well as to report their most recent dream, by...
Lucid dreaming-the phenomenon of experiencing waking levels of self-reflection within one's dreams-is associated with more wake-like levels of neural activation in prefrontal brain regions. In addition, alternating periods of wakefulness and sleep might increase the likelihood of experiencing a lucid dream. Here we investigate the association between sleep fragmentation and lucid dreaming, with...
The outcome of the survey of 981 respondents on phase state (PS): lucid dreaming (LD), sleep paralysis (SP), out-of-body experiences (OBE), and false awakening (FA). The survey took place in Moscow, Russia (March 16-17, 2019) Survey The study took place on March 16th and 17th, 2019 in the form of a live survey on the streets of Moscow, Russia. A group of nine assistants was instructed to ask...
Dream enactment behavior is a phenomenon demonstrated in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder, as well as with a more recently described condition entitled trauma-associated sleep disorder, which shares diagnostic criteria for rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder. While these conditions share some commonalities, namely dream enactment...