Background: This study aimed to examine the relationships among dream themes, coping attitudes, and emotional authenticity. Dreams may serve as important phenomenological indicators reflecting individuals’ emotional processes and coping patterns in waking life. Methods: Using a quantitative correlational survey design, data were collected from 555 participants through the Dream Themes Scale...
This paper explores the possibility that conscious experience may possess a more fundamental and persistent feature than many forms of selfhood ordinarily associated with consciousness. Drawing upon reports from dreaming, contemplative practice, psychedelic states, nondual awareness, and other altered conditions, the paper examines a recurring observation: autobiographical identity, agency,...
From an ideometrics-based perspective, consciousness may reduce the informational entropy of many randomly possible future outcomes through ideometric processes. Consciousness enables a system to internally simulate alternative futures and then voluntarily act, based on ideometric processes, towards realising preferred states in external reality. This may explain why most humans gravitate...
Prediction error is a discrepancy between a prior expectation and what is experienced. Predictive processing posits that prediction errors lead to updates of previously acquired models, beliefs, and expectations. They can be valenced (i.e., better or worse than expected) or non-valenced. The presence of prediction errors in dreams remains debated, while dream reports do contain surprise related...
This chapter examines hallucinations linked to sleep as a powerful window into how the brain constructs perception at the borders between waking and dreaming. It focuses on hallucinations arising in hypnagogic (sleep-onset) and hypnopompic (awakening) states, in isolated episodes in the general population and in the context of sleep paralysis, narcolepsy and parasomnias. These experiences...
Dreams are not hidden telegrams from the unconscious. They are pressure maps.This paper argues that dreams should be read as temporary simulations of how the psyche routes avoidance, desire, threat, shame, memory, relation, symbol, and possible repair. A dream matters when it shows the structure of a truth waking life has not yet found a way to carry.The paper places Structural Intelligence in...
Revanchism has evolved—in both ideological and material-embodied senses of the term—in the decades since Neil Smith's conceptualization in The New Urban Frontier, and since the wave of poststructuralist critiques elicited by David Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity. Most troubling are adaptive cybernetic fusions of 21st century computational life with recrudescent 19th-century Social Darwinist...
This paper provides a critical desk-based review of the relationship between the pineal gland and “hyperdimensional wisdom” by drawing on neuroendocrinology, consciousness studies, religious and cultural history, and public science narratives. It does not define hyperdimensional wisdom as objective knowledge from higher-dimensional space, nor does it treat the pineal gland as an empirically...
Anxiety, sexuality, and dreams are the three pillars upon which psychoanalytic models of the mind are based, yet these phenomena also have a specific place in the domain of neuroscience. Evidence has been provided to demonstrate that anxiety is clearly neurobiologically based in both humans and animals. This position situates it at the intersection of various theoretical models and enables...
Dreams remain one of the most intriguing phenomena in psychology and neuroscience. Recent brain imaging studies have revealed that the cortex—especially the prefrontal cortex—plays a variable role in dream processes depending on the level of consciousness. This article discusses the role of the cortex in conscious (lucid) and unconscious (normal) dream processes in light of current experimental...