This hybrid work combines art criticism and artist interview to examine Robert Seidel’s experimental film Hysteresis (2021) as a meditation on consciousness at the threshold of human-machine convergence. Drawing on Maurizio Ferraris’s concept of hysteresis—the persistence of effects beyond their causes—the paper argues that Seidel’s five-minute film offers a rare aesthetic glimpse into...
This work proposes a unified, multimodal framework for understanding near-death experiences (NDEs) as structured transformations of the human world-model under extreme physiological stress. Drawing on findings from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, phenomenology, and developmental research, the paper argues that core NDE features—such as tunnel-like vision, out-of-body experiences, altered...
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) represents one of the most debilitating psychiatric conditions. Posttraumatic stress disorder is frequently accompanied by sleep disturbances, including insomnia and trauma-related nightmares, affecting up to 90% of individuals with this condition. This literature review examines the bidirectional relationship between sleep disturbances and PTSD symptoms,...
What should one do with a writer about mystical experience if he lacks that experience? Does this thinker have the right to speak about it? I am one of those outsiders who—as far as I am aware—has not had any mystical experience. Yet there are holes in this reasoning when one considers that there are phenomena very similar to, and perhaps overlapping with, mystical experiences that people...
Abstract The casebooks of English physician and astrologer Simon Forman (1552–1611) provide rich material with which to explore the role that dreams played in the construction of the self in the early modern period. Forman’s dream accounts were an important part of his self-invention as a divinely inspired astrological physician. They are also illustrations of how Forman’s sense of selfhood,...
Abstract Working outwards from one dream report in the Threshold Worlds database, this chapter examines three aspects of permeability or ‘cognitive transit’ in dream experience, relating to perspective, planning, and precision. Reports of seeing oneself in the dreamed scene are common, and don’t require us to postulate an extra ‘self’. A plan formulated in the dream escapes, finding a life of...
Abstract This chapter proposes an interdisciplinary model for oneiric experientiality, which makes the case for dreams being immersive, and for immersive worlds. It compares dream and waking lives, and it provides conceptual, phenomenological, and ontological contrast by adding also our experience of fictional worlds to the mix (via the concepts of fictional immersion and ‘saturation’). The...
Abstract Lucid dreaming refers to the awareness that one is experiencing a dream, which for some may also include being able to control actions in events in the dreamworld. In recent years there has been growing interest in the experimental possibilities of lucid dreaming, and its potential benefits for health and wellbeing. But who are the lucid dreamers, and how do they have (or learn) this...
Psychotic-like experiences are subclinical psychotic symptoms that are usually accompanied by sleep problems, negative emotions, and poorer cognitive functioning. However, their night-to-day associations remain understudied in older adults. 72 participants aged 50-79 took part in a home-based sleep study. After an intelligence test, they reported their sleep quality, dream and morning emotions,...
This paper examines the intersection between religiosity and the psyche in the work of Carl Gustav Jung, focusing on the concepts of symbol, collective unconscious, and archetype. Based on the Jungian definition of religion as an experience of the ‘numinous’, we analyze how these notions underpin the understanding of religiosity as an expression of universal psychic structures. The study...