Illness Crisis & Loss
October 8, 2026
Ruth Parkes
Hypnagogic and hypnopompic (H&H) events are sleep phenomena which occur at the borders of consciousness between falling asleep and beginning to wake. There is limited qualitative exploration of the nature of these experiences, and no studies have yet been conducted specifically with accident survivors who go on to experience H&H events. The current paper uses Interpretative Phenomenological...
The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
October 8, 2026
Christopher Krupa
Bogotá Dreaming immerses readers in the feral dreamworlds of the discarded foot soldiers of Colombia's armed conflict and narco-economy as they try to survive through cycles of addiction and institutionalized recovery in Bogotá’s underworlds. The article is set in 2016–2017 but, like the dreams themselves, time in Romero's article is an elusive anchor, always present but not always in ways we...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
October 7, 2026
Jeong-jae Lee
preprint
Where Do We Go When We Fall Asleep? — On the Boundaries of Reality Shaped by the Five Senses is a philosophical and speculative essay that reconsiders the conventional distinction between dreams and reality. The essay begins with a simple question: Why do we regard only the world experienced while awake as reality? It proposes that the five senses may function not only as windows onto reality,...
International Journal of Arabic-English Studies
October 6, 2026
Bayan AlAmmouri
This paper examines Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel (2025) as a technological dystopia that exposes the neoliberal extension of market‑driven rationality into the human psyche. Neoliberalism attempts to extend the figure of the homo economicus into a seamless homo technologicus seeking to capture even the most intimate terrains of subjectivity—dreams, emotions, and aspirations. The novel...
Religions
October 4, 2026
Hao Zhong, Gong Hua-nan
Pre-Qin Confucians frequently discussed dreams; it is a significant contribution of the Zhuangzi to elaborate on the self and self-transcendence through the medium of dreams. The particular nature of dreams is closely associated with death and intoxication. The attitude to death and drunkenness indicates that pre-Qin Confucians did not engage in extensive reflection on dreams or the...
arXiv (Cornell University)
October 2, 2026
Wiesław L Galus, Janusz A. Starzyk
preprint
Victor Lamme's Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT) proposes that the feedforward sweep (FFS) can extract and categorize visual features unconsciously, while conscious vision emerges through recurrent processing and feedback interactions across representational levels. The Motivated Emotional Mind (MEM) model, developed by Wiesław L. Galus and Janusz A. Starzyk, retains this core principle but...
Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology
October 1, 2026
A. Purcell, Daniel L. Morris, Jahred Rosa-Sullivan et al.
Objective: Over the past 60 years, contemplative practices have been shown to alleviate certain mental health symptoms. Humans spend approximately one third of their lives asleep, yet there is limited scientific investigation of the benefit of performing contemplative exercises during sleep. Tibetan Buddhist Dream Yoga (TBDY) is a contemplative practice where dreamers perform mental exercises...
Psychosis
September 29, 2026
Justin McDermott
Background This first-person account develops Clouded Conscious-ness Theory (CCT) as a modest formulation lens for psychosis: a way of describing how reality may become organised from within when salience, threat, emotion, memory, and symbolic meaning interact.Approach I draw on personal experiences in which ordinary events stopped feeling neutral and arrived as messages, accusations, warnings,...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
September 27, 2026
Alexandru C. Stan
preprint
The standalone companion to Vision: From Photon to Mind, this essay picks up the visual signal at the threshold where the retina ends and the brain begins — the lamina cribrosa, the "Stargate" — and follows the central visual pathway station by station: the optic nerve and chiasm, where two eye-centred images are re-sorted into halves of a world; the lateral geniculate nucleus, a "relay" that...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
September 26, 2026
Douwe Fennema
preprint
Abstract During wakefulness, experience continually changes the functional organization of neural networks. Repetition, attention, emotional significance, and other forms of experience-dependent activation can affect the relative strength of synaptic relationships (Hebb, 1949; Bliss & Lømo, 1973; Dudek & Bear, 1992). During sleep, direct coupling to external sensory input and behavioral output...