Abstract Aphantasia is a recently discovered disorder characterised by the total incapacity to generate visual forms of mental imagery. This paper proposes that aphantasia raises important theoretical concerns for the ongoing debate in the philosophy and science of consciousness over the nature of dreams. Recent studies of aphantasia and its neurobehavioral correlates reveal that the majority...
SleepSeptember 4, 2020R. Bottary, G. Simonelli, T. Cunningham et al.
The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has dra-matically impacted the lifestyle of individuals across the globe. In many countries, nationally instituted shelter-in-place orders and closures of non-essential businesses have left many without employment and have forced others to work from home. These policy shifts have changed or removed the socially- and occupa-tionally imposed...
This study analyzes the responses of 3,031 U S adults who, in early May of 2020, completed an online survey regarding their dreams and the COVID-19 outbreak The results indicate that those people most strongly affected by the pandemic also reported the strongest effects on their dream life (heightened dream recall, more negatively toned dreams, and pandemic-related dreams) Pronounced negative...
Nightmares are prevalent in psychiatric disorders, and personality disorder features might be associated with nightmare experience, especially in nightmare disorder patients. The authors invited 219 healthy volunteers and 118 nightmare disorder patients to undergo tests of the Nightmare Experience Questionnaire (NEQ), the Parker Personality Measure (PERM), and the Plutchik-van Praag Depression...
Chronotype refers to individual differences in sleep timing ("owls" and "larks") and "eveningness" has been associated with nightmares. However, it has not been tested as to whether neuroticism mediates this relationship. Urbanicity refers to being raised in an urban region and/or currently living in an urban region and is associated with heightened risk for developing mental disorders, and...
Based on the continuity hypothesis of dreaming with waking life, we have studied the effects of isolation on the dreams of Italian persons, during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic The present study included a sample of 796 subjects (73 2% women;ages 18-79 years, M = 30 3, SD = 12 8) Participants were asked to complete a dream questionnaire, as well as to report their most recent dream, by...
Lucid dreaming-the phenomenon of experiencing waking levels of self-reflection within one's dreams-is associated with more wake-like levels of neural activation in prefrontal brain regions. In addition, alternating periods of wakefulness and sleep might increase the likelihood of experiencing a lucid dream. Here we investigate the association between sleep fragmentation and lucid dreaming, with...
The outcome of the survey of 981 respondents on phase state (PS): lucid dreaming (LD), sleep paralysis (SP), out-of-body experiences (OBE), and false awakening (FA). The survey took place in Moscow, Russia (March 16-17, 2019) Survey The study took place on March 16th and 17th, 2019 in the form of a live survey on the streets of Moscow, Russia. A group of nine assistants was instructed to ask...
Dream enactment behavior is a phenomenon demonstrated in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder, rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder, as well as with a more recently described condition entitled trauma-associated sleep disorder, which shares diagnostic criteria for rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder. While these conditions share some commonalities, namely dream enactment...
Cross‐sectional studies suggest a correlation between alterations in dream content reports and executive dysfunction tests in Parkinson’s disease (PD), but this has not been assessed in longitudinal studies. Our objective was to assess the predictive value of dream content for progression of cognitive dysfunction in PD. We prospectively addressed all consecutive, non‐demented patients with PD...