Dream diaries and reports of daytime waking thought were collected from five schizophrenia patients and matched controls. It was more difficult for blind judges to differentiate the patients' than the controls' dream reports from reports of waking thought, and patients reported shorter but more bizarre dreams than did the controls.
Dream reports from 21 dreamers in which a metamorphosis of a person-like entity or animal occurred were coded for characters and animals and for inner states attributed to them (Theory of Mind). In myths and fairy tales, Kelly and Keil (1985) found that conscious beings (people, gods) tend to be transformed into entities nearby in the conceptual structure of Keil (1979). This also occurred in...
Tricyclic antidepressants decrease rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and may suppress sleep atonia. Reports indicate that these agents can induce visual hallucinations, sometimes characterized as hypnopompic or associated with a dissociated sleep-wakefulness state. In addition, disturbing dreams and confusional states were reported during clinical trials and in subsequent studies. To our...
This article examines Ismene's nightmare in book 8 of Statius's Thebaid by contextualizing it within the epic's narrative, comparing it with the dream narrations of other female characters in epic poetry, and aligning it with other typically female modes of subjective expression in epic, such as weaving, teichoscopy, and lamentation. My analysis shows that by exposing the difficulties inherent...
For the past 20 years and more, arguments about the role of quantum mechanics in consciousness and mind theory have been mounting. On the one side are traditional neuroscientists who believe that the way to understanding the brain is through looking at the nerve cells. On the other side are various physicists who suggest that the laws of quantum mechanics may have an influence on the dynamics...
When researchers use the term mind wandering for task-unrelated thoughts in signal detection tasks, we may fall into the trap of believing that spontaneous thoughts are task unrelated in a deeper sense. Similar negative connotations are attached to common terms like cognitive failures, resting state, rumination, distraction, attentional failures, absent-mindedness, repetitiveness, mind lapses,...
True progress in understanding how experience arises from the brain has been relatively slow when viewed from a historical perspective. Recently, several technologies to study and stimulate the brain have been applied to this field of inquiry. Such progress was made only 2,500 years after the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides first adopted a technical procedure involving the application of...
Emotions are an integral part of dreaming. From the viewpoint of the continuity hypothesis, two areas are of interest: how are dream emotions affected by day-time mood and how do dream emotions affect subsequent waking life. Seventy-four participants kept a diary over a 2-week period recording daytime mood, emotional valence of daytime events, and their dreams. Confirming earlier findings, the...
Subjects reporting a recurring dream at least 4 times a month for a year or more were assigned to a dream recording control group and an experimental group which used muscle testing to guide dream interpretation. Dream frequency was recorded prior to and following a dream interpretation intervention (experimental subjects) or dream reporting session (control subjects). Dream frequency declined...
The paradigm within which hallucinations are studied, and the explanatory frameworks employed, may bias the phenomenological analysis of these experiences. After introducing the new term, hallucination, this paper undertook an inter-disciplinary study of the phenomenology of hallucinations identified by the sixteenth-century theologians, St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila. It was...