Since around 2010, important changes occurred in research on the neural bases of dreaming. From the 1960s until the end of the century, most sleep physiologists and some dream researchers continued to adhere to the view that rapid eye movement (REM) sleep was the functional state of the brain concomitant to dreaming, in spite of numerous published findings falsifying that view. At the beginning...
Author's précis of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, including the author's response to commentators.
In order to further our understanding about the limits of human consciousness and the dream state, we report meta-analytic results on experimental dream-ESP studies for the period 1966 to 2016. Dream-ESP can be defined as a form of extra-sensory perception (ESP) in which a dreaming perceiver ostensibly gains information about a randomly selected target without using the normal sensory...
Sleep problems are recognized as widespread in patients with psychosis. Other facts are known as well – that not only can psychiatric illness result in sleep problems, but that these same problems can exacerbate psychopathology and that they constitute risk factors for suicide. Sleep difficulties are known to respond well to appropriate treatment and yet, with the exception of insomnia, sleep...
Les théories récentes de la conscience incarnée (embodiment) soulignent que l'esprit est un processus incarné, impliquant le cerveau, le corps et l'environnement. Plusieurs aspects de la cognition, de l’interaction sensorimotrice avec l’environnement à la pensée abstraite et métaphorique, ont été conceptualisés dans ce paradigme. Le sommeil et le rêve, cependant, ont rarement été abordés par...
Background: Research studies on sleep medicine and disorders using Arab participants are limited, particularly the relationship between nightmares and psychopathology. Cross-cultural studies may help to better understand this association.
Research on nightmares has largely focused on the nightmare itself and its associated negative consequences, framing nightmare sufferers as victims of a diathesis-stress induced form of psychopathology. However, there is evidence that frequent nightmare recallers are sensitive to a wide range of sensory and emotional experiences, and report vivid, bizarre and even intensely positive dream and...
Objective: Nightmares are among the most frequent and disturbing symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, basic research questions regarding key associations between certain nightmare characteristics, especially replicativeness, and posttraumatic psychopathology need further empirical elaboration. Method: Sixty-two German soldiers (mean age 33.8 years, 17.7% females) admitted...
This chapter reports on the themes and process of a conference organized by Thomas Kohut and the author through the Erikson Institute at the Austen Riggs Center. The title of the conference was “The Legacy of Perpetrator Trauma in Groups and Families” as experienced by descendants of Nazis, generations not guilty in deed but affected by powerful feelings of guilt, shame, and horror by...
Recent advances in electrophysiological [e.g., surface high-density electroencephalographic (hd-EEG) and intracranial recordings], video-polysomnography (video-PSG), transcranial stimulation and neuroimaging techniques allow more in-depth and more accurate investigation of the neural correlates of dreaming in healthy individuals and in patients with brain-damage, neurodegenerative diseases,...