Hypnagogia, a state of consciousness between wakefulness and sleep, provides a palette where conscious awareness intertwines with dream images. This state is compared with synesthesia, the imaginal realm, and Jung's active imagination process as inspiration for artistic creation.
One of the major debates in classical Indian philosophy concerned whether consciousness is present or absent in dreamless sleep. The philosophical schools of Advaita Vedānta and Yoga maintained that consciousness is present in dreamless sleep, whereas the Nyāya school maintained that it is absent. Consideration of this debate, especially the reasoning used by Advaita Vedānta to rebut the Nyāya...
Abstract\n\n“Royal road to the unconscious” as considered by Dr. Sigmund Freud during his dream analysis in 1900 gives a good start to the philosophers when it comes to satisfy their theories in psychophysiological manner. During the early stages of human evolution, there have always been physical and materialistic needs that were to be fulfilled as a necessity of survival. Dreams on the...
This article explores the notion that the brain is genetically endowed with an innate virtual reality generator that - through experience-dependent plasticity - becomes a generative or predictive model of the world. This model, which is most clearly revealed in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep dreaming, may provide the theater for conscious experience. Functional neuroimaging evidence for brain...
Recent findings link fronto-temporal gamma electroencephalographic (EEG) activity to conscious awareness in dreams, but a causal relationship has not yet been established. We found that current stimulation in the lower gamma band during REM sleep influences ongoing brain activity and induces self-reflective awareness in dreams. Other stimulation frequencies were not effective, suggesting that...
Consciousness is defined and a relation is established between its altered states of consciousness (ASC) and as well to the ways how they are provoked. Phenomenology of ASC is described and related to psychopathology. A short commentary is made about ASC used in some ethnopsychotherapy. Psychotherapy, of western origin, using ASC, specially hypnosis, directed day-dream (reve eleille dirige) of...
NeuropsychologiaApril 2014Guillaume Herbet, Gilles Lafargue, Nicolas Menjot De Champfleur et al.
Neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies including both patients with disorders of consciousness and healthy subjects with modified states of consciousness suggest a crucial role of the medial posteroparietal cortex in conscious information processing. However no direct neuropsychological evidence supports this hypothesis and studies including patients with restricted lesions of this brain...
Converging evidence suggests that dreaming is influenced by the consolidation of memory during sleep. Following encoding, recently formed memory traces are gradually stabilized and reorganized into a more permanent form of long-term storage. Sleep provides an optimal neurophysiological state to facilitate this process, allowing memory networks to be repeatedly reactivated in the absence of new...
Dreaming is an important state of consciousness that complements the awake state. Self-awareness, as well as the ability to recognize other people, are essential characteristics of everyday life. The recognition of Self and others is based on, among others, autobiographical and episodic memory, and emotional, and evaluative systems, or perceptual cues. The goal of the paper is to answer a...