In what sense is dreaming real to people of different cultures? How do they come to conclude that dreaming is real, and how do they use dreams to expand their knowledge and control of real events? The reader is introduced to dream anthropology and shown that there are universal patterns to how dreams are experienced, expressed, and used by societies. The distinction between monophasic and...
If an instance of conscious experience of the seemingly objective world around us could be regarded as a newly formed event memory, much as an instance of mental imagery has the content of a retrieved event memory, and if, therefore, the stream of conscious experience could be seen as evidence for ongoing formation of event memories that are linked into episodic memory sequences, then unitary...
Dreaming-a particular form of consciousness that occurs during sleep-undergoes major changes in the course of the night. We aimed to outline state-dependent features of consciousness using a paradigm with multiple serial awakenings/questionings that allowed for within as well as between subject comparisons. Seven healthy participants who spent 44 experimental study nights in the laboratory were...
This metatheoretical paper investigates mind wandering from the perspective of philosophy of mind. It has two central claims. The first is that, on a conceptual level, mind wandering can be fruitfully described as a specific form of mental autonomy loss. The second is that, given empirical constraints, most of what we call "conscious thought" is better analyzed as a subpersonal process that...
This metatheoretical paper develops a list of new research targets by exploring particularly promising interdisciplinary contact points between empirical dream research and philosophy of mind. The central example is the MPS-problem. It is constituted by the epistemic goal of conceptually isolating and empirically grounding the phenomenal property of "minimal phenomenal selfhood," which refers...
Recently, we proposed a novel biophysical concept regarding on the appearance of brilliant lights during near death experiences (NDEs) (Bókkon and Salari, 2012). Specifically, perceiving brilliant light in NDEs has been proposed to arise due to the reperfusion that produces unregulated overproduction of free radicals and energetically excited molecules that can generate a transient enhancement...
The hypnotic trance is common to various altered states of consciousness including: the ecstasies, the stigmata, miraculous healings, hallucinations, OBEs (out of body experiences), the hypnagogic state, near-death experiences, mystical death and the lucid dream. The author after analyzing the aforementioned states of consciousness, focuses on hypnosis and trance, exposing his own model,...
Sir, Dr. Satwant Pasricha's Guest Editorial[1] (Vol. 53 Number 1), ‘Relevance of para-psychology in psychiatric practice’, makes an interesting reading. There is no denying the fact that many people have personally experienced intuition, gut-feelings, premonitions and dreams, empathy, and inspired creativity. They also include more extreme experience, such as telepathy, clairvoyance,...
Dynamics of creative mental activity are examined in waking and dreaming processes which manifest beyond normative waking consciousness. Some consider such phenomena to be pathological or meaningless. Alternatively they may be viewed in new and healthier ways, in the context of adaptive mental controls, using nonlinear dynamical/chaos theory. The first example involves the innovativeness...
This paper presents a theoretical review of rapid eye movement sleep with a special focus on pontine-geniculate-occipital waves and what they might tell us about the functional anatomy of sleep and consciousness. In particular, we review established ideas about the nature and purpose of sleep in terms of protoconsciousness and free energy minimization. By combining these theoretical...