Although psychoanalysts are interested in symptom reduction as an outcome, they are looking for instruments to measure sustaining changes in the unconscious mental functioning. In this article it is discussed that conceptually well-founded transformation of manifest dreams analyzed with precise empirical methods could be considered as a promising indicator for such therapeutic changes. We are...
There are many theories of the function of dreams, such as memory consolidation, emotion processing, threat simulation and social simulation. In general, such theories hold that the function of dreams occurs within sleep; occurs for unrecalled dreams as well as for dream that are recalled on awakening; and that conscious recall of dreams is not necessary for their function to occur. In...
Sleep disorders and nightmares are core symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The relationship seems to be bidirectional, and persistent disturbed sleep may influence the course of the disorder. With regard to sleep quality, insomnia and nocturnal anxiety symptoms, as well as nightmares and stressful dreams, are the most prominent sleep symptoms. Polysomnographic measurements...
Imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT) is an evidence-based treatment for nightmare disorder (ND), and numerous studies have demonstrated its ef fi cacy in reducing the frequency and severity of nightmares. ND and REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD) co-occur, yet the impact of successful treatment of nightmares on dream enactment in RBD has not been studied. In this case study, we present the treatment...
The brain mechanisms by which we transition from sleep to a conscious state remain largely unknown in humans, partly because of methodological challenges. Here we study a pre-existing dataset of waking up participants originally designed for a study of dreaming (Horikawa, Tamaki, Miyawaki, & Kamitani, 2013) and suggest that suddenly awakening from early sleep stages results from a two-stage...
Gestalt therapists believe that their task is to help their clients to experience repressed, ambivalent, and unpleasant things in order to accept and implement them in their whole self. To implement those 'things', those elements of the self, they need to be uncovered first, which is a process that often is achieved by dream work, as messages from the unconscious that are stuck in our dreams...
First-person reports of Major Depressive Disorder reveal that when an individual becomes depressed a profound change or ‘shift’ to one’s conscious experience occurs. The depressed person reports that something fundamental to their experience has been disturbed or shifted; a change associated with the common but elusive claim that when depressed one finds oneself in a ‘different world’ detached...
This paper serves psychotherapeutic process research and shows the process of change in a psychodynamic, individual psychological psychotherapy by means of a theory-based content analysis of the dreams reported in this therapy. The analysis of the patient’s dreams is carried out according to the dream coding method by Ulrich Moser and Vera Hortig (2019). The guiding question is about changes in...
Abstract This paper presents a pilot study that explores instances of objectless awareness during sleep: conscious experiences had during sleep that prima facie lack an object of awareness. This state of objectless awareness during sleep has been widely described by Indian contemplative traditions and has been characterised as a state of consciousness-as-such; while in it, there is nothing to...
Objective: To elucidate the incidence rates and predictive factors for parasomnias (disorders of arousal, nightmare, and sleep paralysis) in adolescents. Methods: This was a prospective cohort study of high school students. In 2010, we conducted a baseline survey of first-year students enrolled in randomly selected Japanese schools (10 junior high schools and 14 senior high schools); 2 years...