I investigated individual differences in the frequency of lucid dreams experienced by university students and related factors. In Study 1, approximately 700 university students were surveyed regarding lucid dreams, nightmares, the frequency of sensory experiences in dreams, vividness and control of imagery, fantasy proneness, and nightmare distress. Results indicated that the frequency of lucid...
Dreams have been considered clinically significant. Research on dreams can be broadly classified into case and survey studies. This study focuses on survey studies on dreams in clinical psychology in Japan, taking a general view of them. It also focuses on the heterogeneity of images, which is one perspective on perceiving images, and discusses the significance of examining the heterogeneity of...
Unusual bodily experiences (UBEs) are illusory bodily perceptions that are not coherent with typical wakeful experiences, including flying or floating sensations, body distortions, and out-of-body experiences. This study examines UBEs in a controlled sleep laboratory using meditation and light stimulation to facilitate their occurrence. A total of N = 35 healthy participants underwent...
This article explores the tension between classical psychoanalytic interpretations of dreams and contemporary physiological measurements of sleep. By integrating Freudian theory with data obtained from wearable sleep-tracking technology, the study demonstrates that REM sleep can occur without subjective dream recall. Introducing the concept of the digital unconscious, the article proposes a new...
While most research on sleep mentation focuses on dream reports, sleep experiences can also include reports lacking content, such as white dreaming —the feeling of knowing one dreamt but being unable to recall its contents. I claim that white dreaming is a metacognitive feeling, akin to tip‐of‐the‐tongue and déjà experiences. Conceiving it this way allows for a more nuanced understanding of its...
Background: Mizaj (temperament) is a core concept in Unani medicine, reflecting an individual’s constitutional makeup and influencing physical, psychological and behavioral traits. Classical texts suggest that mizaj modulates dream patterns and sleep quality, yet empirical evidence integrating traditional temperament assessment with contemporary dream and sleep metrics is limited. To...
In this essay, dream reports of the author’s dream diary were probed for their temporal aspects regarding dream production and experience. Three different general inferences were drawn from the dream contents: (a) Dreams are produced and experienced in real-time. (b) Dreams are produced in advance, saved and experienced later. (c) Dreaming is constant, being aware of it is variable. There was...
Neuroscientific investigations of human dreaming have been hampered by reliance on dream recall after awakening. For example, a challenge of associating EEG features with post-waking dream reports is that they are subject to distortion, forgetting, and poor temporal precision. In this study, we used real-time reporting to investigate whether one of the most robust features of the waking visual...
Reactivation of waking neuronal activity during sleep holds a functional role in memory consolidation. Reprocessing of daytime memory in dreams might aid later memory performance in a similar way. Numerous findings hint at a link between dreaming and sleep-dependent memory processing; however, studies investigating day-residue incorporation in dreaming led to mixed results so far. In this...
ExploreJune 4, 2025Jenny Moix, Samantha Baldaccini, Marta Isern
Despite the growing body of scientific research on Out of Body Experiences (OBEs), a scoping review has not yet been conducted. A search was conducted across six databases. Studies published between 1987 and 2024 were included, resulting in the selection of 87 publications. The analyzed factors included deliberate inducing, predisposing, precipitating, consequential, phenomenological, and...