Visualizing the human subconscious presents significant challenges due to its abstract nature. This paper introduces Dream Complex, an Augmented Reality (AR) system that combines physical models with digital interfaces to create a tangible, non-linear dream narrative. Based on psychoanalytic theories, we developed a 3D coordinate system categorizing dreams by emotion type, amplitude, and...
Mediumistic experience occupies a contested position at the intersection of neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, religious studies, philosophy of mind, and consciousness research. Reports of communication with deceased persons, ancestors, deities, spirits, or other nonordinary intelligences recur across historical periods and cultural settings, often involving voice-hearing, sensed presence,...
What do hunter-gatherer rock art motifs portray, and what does this tell us about their religious experiences? David Lewis-Williams was instrumental in establishing the connection between certain cultures’ corpora of art, shamanism and altered states of consciousness imagery. But one aspect of that spectrum of consciousness has been previously understudied. This is the place of Jung’s ‘Big...
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) during sleep involve a transient disruption of bodily self-consciousness, in which the self or center of awareness is experienced as displaced from the physical body. Although OBEs have been reported in neurological, psychiatric, and dissociative contexts, they also occur in non-clinical populations, raising the question of whether their altered-self phenomenology...
Human beings navigate daily life by relying on a set of implicit assumptions about reality, assumptions so deeply ingrained as to appear self-evident. This paper examines ten of these assumptions, collectively termed naïve psychology, and demonstrates that each of them, when subjected to rigorous scientific and philosophical scrutiny, proves to be fundamentally mistaken. The ten beliefs...
Scientific ReportsJune 12, 2026Derek H. Arnold, Loren N Bouyer, Merlin Monzel
Aphantasia was initially characterised as a pictorial imaginative deficit, but many people with Aphantasia also report having imaginative inabilities for other sensory modalities, such as for imagined sensations of audition, taste, smell, touch, and of body movements. Moreover, patterns of imaginative inability across different types of imagined experience are individually specific to different...
Sleep-related rhythmic movement disorder (SRRMD) is uncommon in adults. It can closely mimic nocturnal epilepsy and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder (RBD), creating significant diagnostic challenges. We report the case of a man in his mid-20s presenting with chief complaints of nightly head movements during sleep occurring multiple times each night. He intentionally shook his...
This paper explores the possibility that conscious experience may possess a more fundamental and persistent feature than many forms of selfhood ordinarily associated with consciousness. Drawing upon reports from dreaming, contemplative practice, psychedelic states, nondual awareness, and other altered conditions, the paper examines a recurring observation: autobiographical identity, agency,...
From an ideometrics-based perspective, consciousness may reduce the informational entropy of many randomly possible future outcomes through ideometric processes. Consciousness enables a system to internally simulate alternative futures and then voluntarily act, based on ideometric processes, towards realising preferred states in external reality. This may explain why most humans gravitate...
Prediction error is a discrepancy between a prior expectation and what is experienced. Predictive processing posits that prediction errors lead to updates of previously acquired models, beliefs, and expectations. They can be valenced (i.e., better or worse than expected) or non-valenced. The presence of prediction errors in dreams remains debated, while dream reports do contain surprise related...