March 30, 2004
Montague Ullman
Despite their universality, interest in dreams has focused almost exclusively on their clinical usefulness. Until recently there has been no serious attempt to make dreams available to the general public. Any such attempt would have to be consistent with the basic phenomenological features of dreaming consciousness and would have to take into account the vulnerability of the dreamer. The group...
2004
Rainer Schönhammer
2 citations
Many authors provide examples of dreams in which a staircase figures as a setting for floating, flying, falling or dizziness. As is well known, Freud interpreted dream stairs as a symbol of sexual activity. Alternative symbolic interpretations of dream stairs have been suggested by Silberer, Eliade and Ouspensky. Based on a phenomenological analysis of published staircase dreams and reports...
Journal of Near-Death Studies
2004
Raymond L. M. Lee
3 citations
Article discussing the meaning of the clear light in dream yoga and in the near-death experience in order to inquire into the interpretation of its role in spiritual emancipation.
TheScientificWorldJournal
November 13, 2003
Søren Ventegodt, Niels Jørgen Andersen, Joav Merrick
The field of holistic medicine is in need of a scientific approach. We need holistic medicine--and we even need it to be spiritual to include the depths of human existence--but we need it to be a little less "cosmic" in order to encompass the whole human being. Many important research questions and challenges, empirical as well as theoretical, demand the attention from medical researchers. Like...
Consciousness and Cognition
June 2003
Jonathan Smallwood, Marc Obonsawin, Derek Heim
Task unrelated thought (TUT) refers to thought directed away from the current situation; for example, a day dream. Encapsulated models of cognition propose that qualitative changes in consciousness, i.e., the production of TUT, can be explained in terms of changes in the quantity of resources deployed for task completion. In contrast, distributed models of cognition emphasize the importance of...
Consciousness and Cognition
May 19, 2003
Arne Dietrich
486 citations
It is the central hypothesis of this paper that the mental states commonly referred to as altered states of consciousness are principally due to transient prefrontal cortex deregulation. Supportive evidence from psychological and neuroscientific studies of dreaming, endurance running, meditation, daydreaming, hypnosis, and various drug-induced states is presented and integrated. It is proposed...
American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis
2003
Ernest Lawrence Rossi
16 citations
The historical lineage of therapeutic hypnosis in James Braid's "psychophysiology", Pierre Janet's "physiological modification", and Milton Erickson's "neuro-psycho-physiology" is extended to include current neuroscience research on activity-dependent gene expression, neurogenesis, and stem cells in memory, learning, behavior change, and healing. Three conditions that optimize gene expression...
Kybernetes
December 1, 2002
Stanley Krippner, Allan Combs
7 citations
This systems model of dreaming consciousness examines the self‐organizing properties of the sleeping brain, offering a step towards reconciling brain‐based and content‐based attempts to understand the nature of dreaming. The brain can be understood as a complex self‐organizing system that, in dreaming, responds to subtle influences such as residual feelings and memories. The...
The antipodes Of the mind
November 7, 2002
Benny Shanon
Abstract There must be a fourth state beyond the waking, dreaming and dreamless states in which the absolute oneness of Brahman-Atman is what should be known. Ayahuasca is an agent that induces an altered state of consciousness; as such, it does precisely that-it modifies people’s state of consciousness. In this chapter (and in Chs. 14 and 16) I examine these modifications and the effects...
International Journal of Psychophysiology
November 2002
Jirí Wackermann, Peter Pütz, Simone Büchi et al.
Manifestations of experimentally induced altered states of consciousness in the brain's electrical activity as well as in subjective experience were explored via the hypnagogic state at sleep onset, and the state induced by exposure to an unstructured perceptual field (ganzfeld). Twelve female paid volunteers participated in sessions involving sleep onset, ganzfeld, and eyes-closed relaxed...