Despite their universality, interest in dreams has focused almost exclusively on their clinical usefulness. Until recently there has been no serious attempt to make dreams available to the general public. Any such attempt would have to be consistent with the basic phenomenological features of dreaming consciousness and would have to take into account the vulnerability of the dreamer. The group...
Recent reports have led to the hypothesis of a central nervous system involvement in myasthenia gravis (MG). As the central cholinergic system also plays an important role in sleep/wake rhythms and in the regulation of REM sleep, sleep perception and dreaming may be altered in MG patients. Seventeen consecutive patients with MG (mean age 49.5 +/- 13.6 years) and 14 healthy controls (mean age...
Although the variability of dream content is large, typical dream themes that occur quite often and are reported by many people can be identified (e.g., being chased, falling, flying, failing an examination, being unable to find a toilet or restroom). The present study is an investigation of the stability of the rank order of the dream themes and of gender differences in the content of dreams....
Many authors provide examples of dreams in which a staircase figures as a setting for floating, flying, falling or dizziness. As is well known, Freud interpreted dream stairs as a symbol of sexual activity. Alternative symbolic interpretations of dream stairs have been suggested by Silberer, Eliade and Ouspensky. Based on a phenomenological analysis of published staircase dreams and reports...
Article discussing the meaning of the clear light in dream yoga and in the near-death experience in order to inquire into the interpretation of its role in spiritual emancipation.
Psychiatry ResearchDecember 1, 2003Rosalind Cartwright, Erin Baehr, Jennifer Kirkby et al.
The contribution of increased rapid eye movement (REM) pressure through repeated, mild, reduction of (REM) sleep to remission from untreated depression was studied over a 5-month period in 20 depressed and 10 control volunteers. Sixty percent of the depressed subjects were in remission at the end of the study. Sixty-four percent of the variance in remission could be accounted for by four...
The field of holistic medicine is in need of a scientific approach. We need holistic medicine--and we even need it to be spiritual to include the depths of human existence--but we need it to be a little less "cosmic" in order to encompass the whole human being. Many important research questions and challenges, empirical as well as theoretical, demand the attention from medical researchers. Like...
The investigators sought to examine correlations for 31 men and women, counseling graduate students and residents of the San Francisco Bay Area and their relation to the attacks on the USA on September 11, 2001. Empathy and traumatic dream reports have been examined in studies primarily on relations between therapists and clients. Studies of the effects of traumatic events on empathy and on...
Task unrelated thought (TUT) refers to thought directed away from the current situation; for example, a day dream. Encapsulated models of cognition propose that qualitative changes in consciousness, i.e., the production of TUT, can be explained in terms of changes in the quantity of resources deployed for task completion. In contrast, distributed models of cognition emphasize the importance of...
It is the central hypothesis of this paper that the mental states commonly referred to as altered states of consciousness are principally due to transient prefrontal cortex deregulation. Supportive evidence from psychological and neuroscientific studies of dreaming, endurance running, meditation, daydreaming, hypnosis, and various drug-induced states is presented and integrated. It is proposed...