Rationale: Stimulation of serotonin 2A (5-HT2A) receptors by lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and related compounds such as psilocybin has previously been shown to increase primary process thinking – an ontologically and evolutionary early, implicit, associative, and automatic mode of thinking which is typically occurring during altered states of consciousness such as dreaming. However, it is...
November 6, 2017Daniel Erlacher, Felix Ehrlenspiel2 citations
This chapter reviews in more detail how sleep is measured and the basic methods of sleep recording. Sleep is generally regarded as a valuable resource for psychological and physiological well-being. A lucid dream is a dream in which the dreamer is aware of the dream state, and lucid dreamers are able to execute complex actions within the dream. In contrast to normal dreaming, lucid dreaming is...
Altered states of consciousness, such as psychotic or pharmacologically-induced hallucinations, provide a unique opportunity to examine the mechanisms underlying conscious perception. However, the phenomenological properties of these states are difficult to isolate experimentally from other, more general physiological and cognitive effects of psychoactive substances or psychopathological...
Computer-based dreams content analysis relies on word frequencies within predefined categories in order to identify different elements in text. As a complementary approach, we explored the capabilities and limitations of word-embedding techniques to identify word usage patterns among dream reports. These tools allow us to quantify words associations in text and to identify the meaning of target...
What does an eminent neuroanatomist dream of at night? The panic of being an auxiliary professor and receiving last minute instructions from the Dean to lecture on osteology? ‘Anxiety, distress … upon reviewing the bones in my memory. I list those of the hand: scaphoids, capitate, and I did not know any more’; or perhaps of secretly cutting slices of medulla for staining in a boarding house at...
What is the conscious mind? What is experience? In 1968, David Armstrong asked “What is a man?” and replied that a man is “a certain sort of material object”. This book starts from his question but proceeds along a different path. The traditional mind-brain identity theory is set aside, and a mind-object identity theory is proposed in its place: to be conscious of an object is simply to be made...
Several studies have demonstrated that dream content is related to the waking life of the dreamer. However, the characteristics of the memory sources incorporated into dreams are still unclear. We designed a new protocol to investigate remote memories and memories of trivial experiences, both relatively unexplored in dream content until now. Upon awakening, for 7 days, participants identified...
This paper addresses Nietzsche's reflections on the phenomenon of dreams as a crucial precedent of Freud's Die Traumdeutung. The works of Nietzsche and Freud are scrutinized to establish and compare the most relevant aspects of their understanding of dreams. The philosophical impact of both accounts is assessed in terms of the transvaluation of religious and metaphysical values, which reveals...
Contemporary nurseOctober 2017Michael Neufeld, Deborah Spence, Tineke Water
Physiological risks of ketamine have been well researched, yet for health professionals (HPs) undertaking paediatric ketamine sedation, questions of benefit and harm remain. What are health care professionals' experiences of undertaking ketamine sedation with children? Hermeneutic narrative. The study comprised hermeneutic narrative analysis of stories from seven HPs in nursing, medicine,...
Chapter 1 highlights the most important and enduring findings from systematic studies of dreaming in sleep laboratories, then discusses their implications. Most importantly, these frequently replicated studies show that dreams are a reasonable simulation of waking life that are only rarely highly unusual or “bizarre” in their structure or content. These studies also show that dreaming happens...