Our dreams are so fleeting that every time we try to recall them, we reinterpret them anew. To explore how human psyche can iterative reconstruct dreams to re-imagine dream content in novel contexts, we created a workflow whereby one dream recorder wrote down eight distinct dreams, and three dream interpreters use these narrative fragments to visually recreate these subconscious experiences...
Open MindNovember 19, 2025Samantha Wang, Paul McKee, Sizhe Chen et al.
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In this project, we will analyze dream reports and mental health measures from a cross-cultural survey conducted in the United States and Argentina. Participants provided free-text dream reports, responses to nightmare and dream-related items (e.g., nightmare frequency, dream intensity, emotional tone), and completed standardized mental health questionnaires: the Patient Health Questionnaire...
The Free Energy Principle (FEP) and active inference unify perception, action, and learning within a single variational framework, yet they remain silent on why there is phenomenal experience at all. Awareness-First Theory (AFT) proposes an ontological inversion: rather than deriving consciousness from non-experiential dynamics, it takes awareness as ontologically primitive—taken as the base...
Lucid dreaming (LD) – in which dreamers become aware that they are currently dreaming – has gained increasing attention in consciousness studies, yet its fine-grained experiential dynamics remain undercharacterized. We conducted in-depth micro-phenomenological interviews on 22 signal-verified lucid dreams experienced in a controlled sleep-laboratory setting, mapping within-episode dynamics from...
An aesthetic product of a fluid vision of existence, by erasing the boundaries between interior and exterior, the surrealist self is itself a system of communicating vessels supported by the project of totality, but a totality of a dynamic, energetic nature, unlike the synthetic totality of the romantic one. If the romantic self, with which it shares the dream of totality and centrality, is an...
Introduction: Mental and emotional health among street children remains an urgent issue in Indonesia due to limited psychosocial support and exposure to daily stressors. This community service program, THREE DREAM (3 Diary Recovery Emotion Actual Mindfulness), was developed as an innovative model combining expressive diary writing and mindfulness training to help children recognize, express,...
This case report describes the clinical response and safety of intranasal esketamine (Spravato®) in a 61-year-old female with treatment-resistant depression (TRD), a history of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) poor response, and structural brain abnormalities secondary to left frontal lobe tissue loss from traumatic brain injury in 2008. Despite multiple antidepressant trials, atypical...
In this paper, I examine the relationship between subjective and objective experiences in dreams, highlighting their psychological and philosophical significance. Dreams act as a space where personal emotions and universal symbols intersect, offering insights into human consciousness. Historical perspectives- from ancient traditions to Freudian and Jungian theories- inform our understanding of...
This paper explores the boundaries between dreams and reality, posing the question of whether an ontology grounded in lucid dreams is possible. It challenges the traditional distinction that perception is real while dreams are illusory, conducting a philosophical analysis through discussions of phenomenology, psychology, existentialism, and perceptual realism. It argues that both perception and...
The question as to whether imaginative experience involves phenomenal presence is increasingly a subject of philosophical debate. In contrast to many contemporary thinkers who hold that waking imaginative experience and dreaming involve a feeling of presence, Jean-Paul Sartre (1940/2004, 1936/2012) argues that the phenomenology of presence accompanies perception only. Sartre thus rejects both...