The gestational period is a sensitive time marked by significant changes that can affect women's sleep and dreaming processes, with an augmented frequency and recall of dreams suggesting that dreaming represents an adaptive mechanism of emotional regulation. This study investigates the relationship between pregnancy-related variables, alexithymia, and depressive symptoms in influencing dream...
Introduction: The daily effects of supernatural-agent (SA) concepts on spirituality remain poorly understood. In this study, we focused on dreaming as an avenue to study the effect of SA concepts on spirituality. This work contributes to a long history of research linking together dreaming and spirituality by utilizing quantitative and longitudinal methods. Methods: We conducted an intensive...
BACKGROUND Functional neurological disorder (FND) is often associated with trauma and dissociation. There is insufficient data on sleep disturbances and nightmare frequency. METHODS Patients with FND (n = 87) were compared with psychosomatic patients (PSM; mainly with affective and somatoform disorders; n = 97) and post-stroke patients (STR; n = 92). Questions focused on subjective sleep...
The fundamental social motives framework has generated several empirical findings demonstrating the activation of a motivational system that guides conscious (live) cognition and downstream behavior in functional ways. This evolutionary view of motivation describes social cognition as an inner motivational state designed to recognize, analyze, and mobilize behaviour to manage social threats or...
The intricate interplay between visual perception and emotion determines how waking experience influences mentation through a 'day residue' at once conspicuous yet hard to predict. Here we set out to map the neural sources associated with the visuo-affective processing of the 'day residue' during hypnagogic sleep. To this end, we assessed 28 healthy participants on a combined nap protocol with...
Dreams incorporate recent experiences, and memory-related brain activity is reactivated during sleep, suggesting that dreaming, memory consolidation, and reactivation are tightly linked. We devised a paradigm to investigate whether memory reprocessing during sleep contributes to dreaming. Participants listened to different audiobooks before falling asleep, introducing dissimilar experiences to...
Background: d cartoon series-the topic has only rarely been researched. Methods: We asked 1,082 participants to complete an online survey to test specific hypotheses on why people perceive that food affects their dreams, including whether specific foods influence dreams directly (food-specific effects), through physiological symptoms (food distress), or via altered sleep quality (sleep...
Sleep Paralysis (SP) is a state that occurs during the hypnagogic or hypnopompic period in which one finds themselves unable to move despite being conscious. During an episode of SP, the individual experiences muscle atonia, as they would during normal sleep, but they remain conscious. SP is also largely associated with three types of hallucinations - the 'intruder', the 'incubus', and an out...
Studies on the electrophysiological and phenomenological aspects of dream experiences provide insight on consciousness during sleep. Whole night polysomnography (PSG) studies were conducted among 29 healthy young participants with high dream recall abilities. Dreams reports were collected during the second night by multiple awakening protocol. On the third night, participants were presented...
Consistent dream sequences that appear genuine and become more upsetting as they progress are known as nightmares. A prevalent condition that significantly impairs psychosocial performance and lowers quality of life is major depression. Insomnia and nightmares independently but additionally have an impact on the exacerbation of depression. Objectives: To find the correlation between depression...
NeuropsychologiaJune 19, 2025Sam Fisher-Hicks, Victoria Lovett, Rodger Ll Wood et al.
Mesial frontal and temporoparietal brain areas differ in activity between high and low dream recallers, and lesion studies have found cessation of dreaming in patients with damage to these areas. This study extends these findings by assessing the relationship of dream cessation, and dream and nightmare frequencies, to severity of injury in patients at a head trauma clinic. 52 participants (M =...
Background: Propofol, the most commonly used anesthetic agent in general anesthesia (GA), has frequently been associated with dreaming and hallucinations. These experiences may lead to serious psychological distress for patients and result in complaints against medical practitioners. Objectives: This study aimed to investigate the incidence and characteristics of dreaming in gynecological...
Abstract Spontaneous thoughts and experiences, such as dreaming and mind wandering, form a significant part of our conscious mental lives. Yet, the precise phenomenological and content-related similarities and differences between dreaming and waking mind wandering remain insufficiently understood. In this study, we address this gap by comparing 340 dreaming and mind wandering questionnaire...
Previous research indicated that the prevalence of frequent nightmares and/or the presence of a nightmare disorder is quite high in patients with mental disorders. In the present study, 75 randomly selected psychiatric inpatients were interviewed and completed questionnaires regarding nightmares, sleep, and psychopathology. The percentage of patients with nightmares once per week or more often...
Nightmares are a common symptom in narcolepsy that has not been targeted in prior clinical trials. This study investigated the efficacy of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Nightmares (CBT-N), adapted for narcolepsy, in a small group of adults. Given the high prevalence of lucid dreaming in narcolepsy, we added a promising adjuvant component, targeted lucidity reactivation (TLR), a procedure...
To many influential dream researchers, dreaming consciousness is not of the same kind as waking. In its most radical and paradoxical form, this theoretical stance consists in maintaining that dream is a case of conscious experience lacking cognitive access. In a more moderate and common form, dreamers have cognitive access to their oneiric experience but lack any executive function: they have...
Dreaming is a fundamental but not fully understood part of human experience. Traditional dream content analysis practices, while popular and aided by over 130 unique scales and rating systems, have limitations. Often based on retrospective surveys or lab studies, and sometimes on in-home dream reports collected over some days, they struggle to be applied on a large scale or to show the...
Dreaming represents a complex and universal aspect of human sleep, yet it remains an intriguing phenomenon, with the neural mechanisms underlying dream experiences and their frequency not fully understood. This study employs a multimodal neuroimaging approach, integrating quantitative multi-parameter mapping, diffusion tensor imaging, and resting-state functional MRI, to investigate the neural...
SleepMay 19, 2025Emily Feldman, Rebecca Essien, Danya Husein et al.
Abstract Introduction Dream recall frequency (DRF), or how often individuals remember and report dreams, is influenced by factors such as family dynamics, mental health, and cultural norms. Women tend to report higher DRF and greater distress from nightmares, while individuals with psychiatric conditions often exhibit reduced DRF. This study examined the relative contributions of childhood...
SleepMay 19, 2025Otis Eads, John Richmond Sy, Ruth Brombach et al.
Abstract Introduction Lucid Dreaming, defined by a preserved sense of insight, thought, and control while dreaming, has been previously linked to internal locus of control, resilience and problem-solving. Lucid Dreaming may be important for individuals to exert a sense of agency in both dreams and daily life. This study therefore investigates how locus of control relates to lucid dreaming...