This brief clinical review summarizes the literature on sleep paralysis most relevant to clinicians. Sleep paralysis is a condition where the sufferer awakens to rapid eye movement sleep based atonia, combined with conscious awareness. This is a frightening event accompanied by vivid, waking dreams and hallucinations. Sleep paralysis occurring independent of narcolepsy and other medical...
The present research explored the relationship between alexithymia, self-reported depression and trait anxiety and dreaming experience in a non-clinical sample. Characteristics of the alexithymia trait, such as the deficit in the symbolic representation of emotions and the limited imaginative ability, can have an impact on the richness and quality of dream experience. Depression and trait...
Reviewed by: Perchance to Dream: Dream Divination in the Bible and the Ancient Near East ed. by Esther J. Hamori and Jonathan Stökl Robert Gnuse esther j. hamori and jonathan stökl (eds.), Perchance to Dream: Dream Divination in the Bible and the Ancient Near East (Ancient Near East Monographs 21; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2018). Pp. xi + 220. Paper $49.95. This little volume offers the critical...
Here I present a mind-object identity theory based on a straightforward hypothesis: One's experience of an object is identical with the object itself. To defend this hypothesis, I will reconsider the notion of a physical object in terms of relative and actual properties. To address cases of misperception such as dreams and hallucinations, I will also reconsider the notion of present in relative...
Four states of consciousness are considered here: the hypnagogic state (the transitional state between waking and sleeping); the hypnopompic state (the transitional state between sleeping and waking); lucid dreaming (insight to the fact that one is currently dreaming); and the out-of-the-body experience (perceiving the world from a location outside the physical body). There are different...
Near-death experiences (NDE) occur with imminent death and in situations of stress and danger but are poorly understood. Evidence suggests that NDE are associated with rapid eye movement (REM) sleep intrusion, a feature of narcolepsy. Previous studies further found REM abnormalities and an increased frequency of dream-enacting behavior in migraine patients, as well as an association between...
Dreams are usually characterized by primary consciousness, bizarreness and cognitive deficits, lacking metacognition. However, lucid dreaming (LD) is a type of consciousness state during which the dreamer is aware of the fact that he or she is dreaming, without leaving the sleeping state. Brain research has found that LD shares some common neural mechanisms with metacognition such as...
Based on past literature, it is here supported that insomnia, and parasomnias such as sleepwalking, sleep terrors and nightmares, reflect an evolutionary survival mechanism, which has threat-related origins and which, in some vulnerable individuals, becomes persistent due to failure of a fear extinction function. Genetic determinants, personality traits and sleep disturbances seem to determine...
In the interest of correlating subjective dream experience with emergent models for dreaming consciousness, the following hypothesis is considered: A variety of anomalies occurring in lucid dreaming suggest that there are two distinct modes of awareness available in the lucid state--focused and objectifying awareness (FOA), and relational immersive awareness (RIA)—and that these distinct modes...
Chapter 7 examines a proposed evolution of human thoughts and how they can be reprocessed using SF-EMDR psychotherapy. It is widely accepted that we use only five per cent of our brain’s capacity for conscious thought. The remaining ninety-five per cent is below our level of conscious control. Various theories on the origin of consciousness are discussed in relation to Dr Stuart Hameroff and Sir...