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...
‘Altered states of consciousness’ discusses the states of consciousness during sleep, dreaming, hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, meditation, and after taking psychoactive drugs. Psychologist Charles Tart defines an altered state of consciousness (ASC) as ‘a qualitative alteration in the overall pattern of mental functioning, such that the experiencer feels his...
AT the same time I think that the strongest argument against the ‘psychical explosion’ or ‘alarum-clock’ doctrine is to be found in the well-established fact that some of us, far from reserving our dream-activity for the moment before waking, begin to dream the moment we close our eyes. This is certainly my own experience. I have been able to collect a great deal of evidence on the point,...