Scholarly depictions of mysticism, as varied as they have been, frequently include visions and dreams on the list of common characteristics. Literary and other material artifacts attest that communion with what is considered in a particular milieu to be the fount of inspiration can provoke revelatory experiences, and the history of Judaism is no exception to this rule. Dreams, in particular,...
Dream reports were collected from normal subjects in an effort to determine the degree to which dream reports can be used to identify individual dreamers. Judges were asked to group the reports by their authors. The judges scored the reports correctly at chance levels. This finding indicated that dreams may be at least as much like each other as they are the signature of individual dreamers....
Dreaming during anaesthesia is defined as any recalled experience (excluding awareness) that occurred between induction of anaesthesia and the first moment of consciousness upon emergence. Dreaming is a commonly-reported side-effect of anaesthesia. The incidence is higher in patients who are interviewed immediately after anaesthesia (approximately 22%) than in those who are interviewed later...
Deleuze, Altered States and Film offers a typology of altered states, defining dream, hallucination, memory, trance and ecstasy in their cinematic expression. The book presents altered states films as significant neurological, psychological and philosophical experiences. Chapters engage with films that simultaneously present and induce altered consciousness. They consider dream states and the...
This chapter describes the mystic. A mystic is one who is gifted with spiritual greatness, vision, imagination, inspiration, and the ability to be exalted; one who is able, awake or in dreams, to cross boundaries of consciousness and to experience a feeling of immediate contact with higher worlds; one who experiences a transition from one reality to another through visions or dreams. By using...
Abstract:This article links the self-attacking black humour of Nathanael West's 1931 debut novel to the kind of internally divided mind Hegel describes in the 'unhappy consciousness' section of his "Phenomenology of Mind". I argue that West's splitting of consciousness is in fact historical. Grounding the novelist in the era of 20s and 30s Fordism, I suggest his work articulates a...
REM or dreaming sleep is one of three states of consciousness. It is characterized by rapid eye movements, muscle atonia, desynchronized EEG, and autonomic dysregulation. A dysfunction of one of these four cardinal traits explains the primary disorders of REM sleep, including REM sleep behavior disorder and narcolepsy. Although seen in other stages, sleep apnea syndrome, coronary syndromes, and...
Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon, by Antti Revonsuo. 2006. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 473 pp., $55.00 (HB). In his Prologue, Antti Revonsuo describes the main task of his book: “To depict a biological research program on consciousness.” (pg. xviii). He is interested in drawing upon proven research strategies to describe how we can study consciousness from a...
Several Buddhist schools in India, China and Japan concentrate on the interrelationships between waking and dreaming consciousness. In Eastern philosophy, reality can be seen as a dream and an obscure ‘reality beyond’ can be considered as real. In spite of the overwhelming Platonic–Aristotelian–Freudian influence existent in Western culture, some Western thinkers and artists—Valéry, Baudelaire,...
This paper reviews scientific literature on four subjective states: the dream state, the dreamy state of temporal lobe epilepsy and temporal lobe stimulation, the acute psychotic state, and the psychedelic state. Evidence is cited showing that underlying the emergence of dreamlike phenomena in all four states is the occurrence of high-voltage bursts of theta and slow-wave activity (2–8 Hz) in...