The words uttered by the eponymous protagonist of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599–1601), “To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub,/For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil/Must give us pause” (3.1.64–67), are almost always read as thoughts of suicide that analogize dreaming sleep to death. 1 Yet it seems possible to take them also...
Immortality is thought to be achieved through heroic deeds, reincarnation, and the afterlife. The present studies reveal an alternative path to transcending death: dying while conscious. Seven studies demonstrate that dying while more awake, aware and/or lucid leads people to see a richer postmortem mind-an effect we call conservation of consciousness. People see more mind in the deceased when...
With the advent of wearable biometric technology like smart watches, “hacking” our bodies' functions and cycles has become a tool in the never-ending quest for better health. And sleep is no exception. For example, a staggering one-third of Americans don't get enough sleep, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A sensor-equipped glove called Dormio tracks a user's...
Ghost encounters were found to be a key part of the trauma ontology among Cambodian refugees at a psychiatric clinic, a key idiom of distress. Fifty-four percent of patients had been bothered by ghost encounters in the last month. The severity of being bothered by ghosts in the last month was highly correlated to PTSD severity (r = .8), and among patients bothered by ghosts in the last month,...
Sleep scientists have shown that dreaming helps people improve their waking lives, and they have done so by developing sophisticated content analysis scales. Dream analysis entails time-consuming manual annotation of text. That is why dream reports have been recently mined with algorithms, and these algorithms focused on identifying emotions. In so doing, researchers have not tackled two main...
PsyArXivAugust 19, 2020Debbie Margaretha Louisa De Boer, Patrick Johnston, Graham Kerr et al.
preprint
Recent theories suggest that self-consciousness, in its most elementary form, is separate from the own body. Patients with psychosis frequently misattribute their thoughts and actions to external sources; and in certain out-of-body experiences, lucid states, and dreams body-ownership is absent but self-identification is preserved. We hypothesized that self-identification depends on inferring...
This chapter covers essential knowledge about lucid dreaming, which includes the psychological meaning of lucid dreaming, how to induce lucid dreaming and how it can be used therapeutically for self-growth. Ways to induce lucid dreaming are through incubating a lucid dream, by linking waking states to dream states, by overcoming fears and resistances to lucid dreaming and by looking for...
This chapter covers basic knowledge about the psychology of dreams, precisely the importance of keeping a Dream Journal, the definition of the existential message of dreams and a list of dream types and their functions, giving systematically one real-life example for each dream type. Among the dream types are: Symbolic dreams; Clear dreams; Hypnagogic dreams; Initial dreams; Nightmares; Anxiety...
It appears from his dense marginal annotations that the Renaissance mathematician, imperial propagandist and occult philosopher John Dee, in the late 1550s, had with apparent interest read the In Librum Aristotelis de memoria et recordatione commentarij of Claudius Campensis. This work — in the name of refuting the ‘impious and wicked’ opinions of Aristotle who ‘linked all the faculties of the...
This study aimed to explore relationships between personality type variables and dream structure variables. In the questionnaire experiment (N=410), we investigated associations between different personality variables in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator questionnaire (MBTI) and various aspects of dreams in the Mannheim Dream questionnaire (MADRE). The MBTI has four dimensions. In the...