Correlations between memories and dreaming has typically been studied by linking conscious experiences and dream reports, which has illustrated that dreaming reflects waking life events, thoughts, and emotions. As some research suggests that sleep has a function of memory consolidation, and dreams reflect this, researching this relationship further may uncover more useful insights. However,...
Sleep paralysis is an experience of being temporarily unable to move or talk during the transitional periods between sleep and wakefulness: at sleep onset or upon awakening. The feeling of paralysis may be accompanied by a variety of vivid and intense sensory experiences, including mentation in visual, auditory, and tactile modalities, as well as a distinct feeling of presence. This chapter...
Dreams are sometimes described as an intensified form of spontaneous waking thought. Lucid dreams may seem to be a counterexample, because metacognitive insight into the fact that one is now dreaming is often associated with the ability to deliberately control the ongoing dream. This chapter uses conceptual considerations and empirical research findings to argue that lucid dreaming is in fact a...
The fleeting dream images of sleep onset afford a rare glimpse at how experience is transformed from the perceptually grounded consciousness of wakefulness to the hallucinatory simulations of dreaming. These images, or microdreams, are briefer, simpler, and more accessible to phenomenological scrutiny than are the long REM dreams traditionally recorded in the sleep lab. This chapter shows that...
This chapter considers a dream reported by Sigmund Freud in the 12th Lecture of his Introduction, entitled “Some analyses of sample dreams”. The dreamer was a neurotic subject. The analysis carried out by Freud is mainly focused on the search for the dream sources. The development of the manifest dream gives the dreamer the possibility of testing what the consequences of his madness are: good...
One of Freud’s assumptions on dreaming, that “dreams are the guardians of sleep”, was proven wrong by sleep researchers. Freud’s notion was that one of the functions of dreaming is to preserve sleep. The researchers found the reverse to be true, namely that “sleep is the guardian of dreams”. Dream consciousness uses more energy than waking consciousness; it uses so much energy that its reserves...
There is an irresistible affinity between the fictions of dreams and fiction writing. Dreams dazzle us by their vivid and succinct images, symbols, and metaphors, which come upon us when we are asleep. One might be tempted, given the dream’s constant supply of images, to call dreaming a nocturnal cinematographic event. Dreams are autobiographical fictions, they are the narrators of the...
This chapter assumes that many fans who had been waiting impatiently for the Beatles&s; new album thought for the first few seconds that the clerk had accidentally wrapped up a classical album. Classical and psychedelic music delimit the eclectic, multistylistic and multigenre nature of Sgt. Pepper. Psychedelia, in contrast, is associated with altered states of consciousness – hallucinations,...
One of the oldest depictions of a dream state is a mural in the complex of caves at Lascaux in southwest France, painted some 18,000 years ago by our European early modern human ancestors. The prehistoric cave paintings of the Perigord area of France, going back to 30,000 BC, are considered the cradle of art in human history but are also a celebration of the state of dreaming. Dreams not only...
A lot of therapy is about the slow recovery of faith, at least more of it, a more informed faith, wiser, fuller, ready for anything. Although S. Freud ostensibly developed a theory and clinical approach to neurosis, the author points out in The Psychotic Core that his concepts are heavily steeped in a phenomenology of psychosis. Freud spoke of flooding as a primal trauma. Mystics also attest to...