Nightmare disorder and recurrent isolated sleep paralysis are rapid eye movement (REM) parasomnias that cause significant distress to those who suffer from them. Nightmare disorder can cause insomnia due to fear of falling asleep through dread of nightmare occurrence. Hyperarousal and impaired fear extinction are involved in nightmare generation, as well as brain areas involved in emotion...
In prior research the author focused on stimulation of the semicircular canal component of vestibular functioning and found a relationship between the frequency with which young adults spontaneously experience lucid dreaming and their responsiveness to caloric irrigation. In order to more fully explore the relationship between vestibular functioning and lucidity, the authors have compared the...
Both Jungian and transpersonal traditions regard meditative and related states as a positive unfolding of an advanced symbolic capacity, with their ostensibly “primitive” features actually being part of an abstractly based reorganization of experience rather than confirming the more traditional psychiatric assumptions of “primitivity” or “regression”. An important feature of long-term...
Sierro C, Leslie W, Putois B. Long-term effects of treatment for chronic nightmares: is imagery rehearsal therapy robust in the COVID-19 pandemic? J Clin Sleep Med. 2020;16(11):1993.
Oneiric Stupor (OS) in Agrypnia Excitata represents a peculiar condition characterized by the recurrence of stereotyped gestures such as mimicking daily-life activities associated with the reporting of a dream mentation consisting in a single oneiric scene. It arises in the context of a completely disorganized sleep structure lacking any physiological cyclic organization, thus, going beyond the...
The ancient Egyptians put quite a bit of emphasis on dreams, although they had no verb for dreaming. It may suggest that they did not consider it an activity but rather a visual phenomenon, which was an uncontrollable phenomenon external to the dreamer. They linked sleep to death (and afterlife), felt that the messages delivered in their dreams could achieve the desire, cure an illness, give...
Frequent nightmares show signs of hyperarousal in NREM sleep. Nevertheless, idiopathic nightmare disorder is considered a REM parasomnia, but the pathophysiology of REM sleep in relation to frequent nightmares is controversial. Cortical oscillatory activity in REM sleep is largely modulated by phasic and tonic REM periods and seems to be linked to different functions and dysfunctions of REM...
During REM sleep we normally experience dreams. However, there are other less common REM sleep phenomena, like lucid dreaming (LD), false awakening (FA), sleep paralysis (SP), and out of body experiences (OBE). LD occurs when one is conscious during dreaming, and FA occurs when one is dreaming but believes that has woken up. SP is characterized by skeletal muscle atonia and occurs mainly during...
The scientific study of dreams is oneirology, that seeks the relationship between dreaming and existing knowledge about the brain; understanding that how the brain functions during dreaming in accordance with memory shaping and mental disorders.
The following article is an exploration of supernal dreaming, a type of dream that engages the dreamer as a profound, participatory, and often revelatory event. Dream types are not well developed in dream research; this article contributes to the development of a more typological approach to dream analysis. Four dream types are presented and contextualized with reference to their metaphysical...