Frontiers in Sleep
September 9, 2026
Brian D. Robertson, Emily F. Wargo, Joel Fay
Objective Nightmares are a common, distressing condition among individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and are associated with impaired sleep quality and elevated suicide risk. First responders carry a substantial burden of occupational trauma and PTSD yet are under-represented in nightmare-treatment research. NightWare is an FDA-authorized prescription wearable that monitors...
arXiv (Cornell University)
September 5, 2026
Carson Rodrigues
preprint
Dreaming and large language model hallucination are usually studied apart, one as biology and the other as engineering. We argue they are two expressions of a single computation: generative reconstruction from distributed memory under incomplete constraints. Neither the sleeping brain nor an autoregressive model retrieves stored records; both synthesize output by recombining learned...
SLEEP Advances
September 4, 2026
Henderson S Holder, Erin J. Wamsley
Abstract Sleep and dreaming have long been hypothesized to serve a functional role in emotion regulation. Here, we investigated how reactivating highly emotional autobiographical memories prior to sleep affects dream content and subsequent emotional appraisal of these memories. Participants (N = 42) completed the Autobiographical Emotional Memory Task (AEMT) prior to bed for three consecutive...
Psychoanalytic Perspectives
September 2, 2026
D. Gilhooley
The author analyzes a dream of an underworld journey undertaken with his deceased parents. Coincident with this dream is an e-mail communication from a patient whose son had recently died and whose wife is currently undergoing treatment for a fatal condition. Last year, at the time of the son’s death, the author and his patient had had a mutual dream of “waking up dead.” Now, realizing his...
Nature and Science of Sleep
September 1, 2026
Jiaxue Huang, Meiou Wang, Wenxin Bao et al.
Objectives: This study conducted a systematic evaluation of polysomnographic differences between individuals with nightmares and healthy controls. Methods: Electronic searches of All EBM databases, EMBASE, Web of Science, and MEDLINE identified 14 eligible case-control studies; seven studies involving 112 individuals with nightmares and 112 controls were included in meta-analysis. Results: The...
Papyrus : Institutional Repository (Université de Montréal)
September 1, 2026
Kennedy Robertson
Le rêve lucide survient lorsqu’un individu prend conscience de rêver en cours de rêve, et s’accompagne souvent d’un sentiment accru d’autonomie et de contrôle. Cette capacité de réflexivité et d’action volontaire a été associée à des bénéfices personnels, thérapeutiques et spirituels, et a suscité l’intérêt des traditions scientifiques et contemplatives. L’un des mécanismes proposés pour...
Nature Medicine
September 2026
Stefan Roepke, Nikola Schoofs, Kathlen Priebe et al.
Nightmares are a hallmark of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), yet pharmacological treatments remain limited. Here we conducted a multicenter, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial to evaluate the efficacy and safety of dronabinol (BX-1; Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)) for PTSD-related nightmares. Adults with PTSD and recurrent nightmares were randomly assigned to receive...
The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
September 1, 2026
Andrés Romero
ABSTRACT This narrative‐driven article explores the dream worlds of people in Bogotá’s downtown drug markets ( ollas ) and rehab centers ( patios ) following the Colombian state's 2016 militarized drug market raids. Drawing on twenty‐one months of fieldwork, it takes up dreams not as residues of a bounded psyche but as co‐constructed worlds where the dead and other forces act upon or orient the...
European Journal of Social Theory
August 27, 2026
Gabriel Peters
Drawing on Bernard Lahire's sociological approach to dreams and revisiting its critical dialogue with Bourdieu, this article presents dreaming as an involuntary modality of reflexivity: an internal communication in which the subject reflects on existential concerns experienced in waking life. Like other forms of reflexivity—from artistic self-expression to reflections articulated on the...
ALIFE 2026: Proceedings of the 2026 Artificial Life Conference
August 17, 2026
Xining Li
We argue that diffusion-based action models provide the structural prerequisites for minimal self-awareness in humanoid robots in a way that standard reactive feedforward policies do not. Three major theories of self-awareness—Friston’s Free Energy Principle (Friston, 2010), Metzinger’s Phenomenal Self-Model Theory (Metzinger, 2003), and Damasio’s two-level self (Damasio,...