This preprint presents The Last Dream, a theoretical model aimed at interpreting the subjective experience that may occur in the seconds immediately following cardiac arrest and preceding irreversible neuronal failure. Drawing on convergent evidence from physics of time, neuroscience, neurochemistry, and psychedelic research, the model explores the plausibility of a transient terminal state...
The continuity hypothesis of dreaming states that dreams reflect waking life, however, research has also shown that dreams can affect waking life, e.g., creativity, daytime mood. So far, factors that are associated with the effect of dreams on waking life have been rarely studied. Overall, 2492 persons (1437 woman, 1055 men) with a mean age of 47.75 ± 14.41 years participated in the study. The...
While the parallels between humor and dreams were already noted by Sigmund Freud over a century ago, funny dreams remain largely overlooked in contemporary research. The present study aimed to assess the associations between funny dreams, various facets of humor, and dream characteristics, while also exploring how humor is expressed within the dream state. Data from 198 survey respondents...
This paper explores the possibility of compassion and coexistence through an auto-ethnographic lens. It draws upon recurrent lucid dreams of Tibet, visions of Nalanda’s destruction, and dialogical conversations with imagined companions such as Po and Pho. These narratives become the site of philosophical inquiry, where questions of knowledge, understanding, and compassion are examined against...
The measurement problem in quantum mechanics challenges our understanding of reality, demanding explanations beyond both Copenhagen's "collapse" and the Many-Worlds' ontological multiplicity. This paper introduces and formalizes the Ze framework as a novel synthesis of Relational Quantum Mechanics (RQM) and the Active Inference paradigm from theoretical neuroscience. Ze posits that quantum...
Consciousness is fundamentally a process of selection, a continuous "collapse" from a manifold of potential states into a singular, coherent narrative. This article introduces the Ze formalism, a theoretical framework that models this process through a cognitive localization parameter, Γ_Ze. We posit that the critical distinction between wakefulness and sleep is not the presence of...
In this paper, I will delve into Evan Thompson’s analysis of dream experiences, which has challenged philosophers and scholars in the past. Many thinkers argue that dreams are not conscious experiences; there is an opposite view in which philosophers still argue for dreams as conscious phenomena. The paper primarily focuses on the hypothesis: ‘Thompson’s explication of dreams as conscious...
This paper argues that consciousness is better modeled as a primitive feature of reality than as an emergent property of neural activity. The standard generation model—the assumption that physical configurations produce subjective experience—faces persistent explanatory difficulties, most notably the binding problem and the explanatory gap between objective process and subjective quality....
This special issue unites original theoretical and empirical research on two topics that are gaining traction in cognitive neuroscience and psychology, but so far have small philosophical footprints: dreaming and waking mind wandering. While the fields of dream and mind wandering research are largely separate, phenomenological and neurophysiological similarities between waking mind wandering...
Conscious experience depends on the coordinated activity of neural processes that span multiple scales: from synapses to whole-brain dynamics. A recently introduced measure, dynamical independence (DI), identifies, characterises, and quantifies these multi-scale relationships using an information-theoretic dimensionality reduction approach. Here, we use DI to examine changes in the emergent...