Lucid dreaming is being conscious and aware while dreaming. Lucid dreaming is a form of meta-consciousness and reflective practice that calls in to question habitual behavior, fixed perceptions, core beliefs, and presuppositions. From an epistemological perspective, lucid dreaming could be considered as a way of knowing. The practice of lucid dreaming ultimately leads to the practice of lucid...
Transcultural psychiatry has increased awareness of alternative approaches to mental health and wellbeing, influencing developments in Western psychotherapeutic treatments. In this article, I look at the recent interest in alternative therapies by the U.S. military, which has explored the possibilities of lucid dreaming in order to help soldiers cope with the adverse mental and emotional...
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...
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...
Anecdotal evidence that lucid dreaming might contribute to mental and physical health has been widely reported in the literature. Empirical research, though, is scarce. A brief questionnaire eliciting self-perceived benefits of lucid dreaming on mental and physical health had been completed by 386 participants who had lucid dream experiences. About 90% of the participants reported some benefit...
arXiv Preprint ArchiveSeptember 29, 2020Yunshu Du, Garrett Warnell, Assefaw Gebremedhin et al.
preprint
Experience replay (ER) improves the data efficiency of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms by allowing an agent to store and reuse its past experiences in a replay buffer. While many techniques have been proposed to enhance ER by biasing how experiences are sampled from the buffer, thus far they have not considered strategies for refreshing experiences inside the buffer. In this...
Lucid dreaming is a phenomenon that can be classified as altered state of consciousness. In the last years the scientific interest for it has grown exponentially. To understand how the research on this topic evolved during the time, bibliometric and network analyses were performed. The focus of the analysis was on: 1) papers; 2) authors; 3) countries and 4) collaborations. Scopus database was...
The words uttered by the eponymous protagonist of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1599–1601), “To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub,/For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil/Must give us pause” (3.1.64–67), are almost always read as thoughts of suicide that analogize dreaming sleep to death. 1 Yet it seems possible to take them also...
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...
This chapter covers essential knowledge about lucid dreaming, which includes the psychological meaning of lucid dreaming, how to induce lucid dreaming and how it can be used therapeutically for self-growth. Ways to induce lucid dreaming are through incubating a lucid dream, by linking waking states to dream states, by overcoming fears and resistances to lucid dreaming and by looking for...
The reliable induction of lucid dreams is a challenge in lucid dream research. In a previous study by our research group we were able to induce in about 50% of the participants a lucid dream in a single sleep laboratory night by combining a wake-up-back-to-bed sleep protocol and a mnemonic technique. In the present study, we extended our previous procedure by additional presentation of an odor...
Dreams in which the dreamer is aware of the dream state (lucid dreams, LD) are difficult to induce in naïve subjects in-laboratory. Recently, Stumbrys and Erlacher (2014) used a combination of existing induction techniques together with a self-developed experiment protocol and achieved comparatively high LD induction rates. In this study, we simplified their methodology slightly and repeated...
Neurophysiological correlates of self-awareness during sleep ('lucid dreaming') remain unclear despite their importance for clarifying the neural underpinnings of consciousness. Transcranial direct (tDC) and alternating (tAC) current stimulation during sleep have been shown to increase dream self-awareness, but these studies' methodological weaknesses prompted us to undertake additional study....
Lucid dreaming is a unique phenomenon with potential applications for therapeutic interventions. Few studies have investigated the effects of lucidity on an individual's waking mood, which could have valuable implications for improving psychological wellbeing. The current experiment aims to investigate whether the experience of lucidity enhances positive waking mood, and whether lucidity is...
Despite a high prevalence and broad interest in flying dreams, these exceptional experiences remain infrequent. Our study aimed to (1) induce flying dreams using a custom-built virtual reality (VR) flying task, (2) examine their phenomenological correlates and (3) investigate their relations to participant state and trait factors. 137 participants underwent VR-flying followed by a morning nap....
Lucid dreaming (being aware that one is dreaming) is typically a positive experience that may enhance positive mood even after waking. There is concern, however, that lucid dreaming may interfere with sleep quality. In the current experiment, participants practiced common lucid dream induction techniques over the course of a week, and kept a daily sleep and dream diary. The study objective was...
Abstract Introduction Nightmares can cause poorer sleep quality. Various mechanisms have been explored as potential treatments for nightmares, including mindfulness practices and lucid dreaming. Presently, little literature has looked at the interaction effects between mindfulness and lucid dreaming to reduce nightmare distress. Methods A sample of 275 individuals was recruited from both the...
IntroductionLucid dreaming (LD) started to be scientifically investigated through instructingdreamers to move their eyes as soon as they become lucid (Hearn, 1978; Laberge et al.,1981). LD signaling through pre-agreed eye movements (PAEM) is possible becauseeye muscles are exempt from the muscular atonia that accompanies REM sleep(Aserinsky and Kleitman, 1953; Jouvet, 1962). In addition, it is...