Dying patients can experience vivid dreams, visions or unexpected lucid episodes despite declining clinical and mental status. This review examines patient end-of-life experiences (ELEs) and their implications to the mind-brain relationship (MBR). A Scoping Review (ScR) was conducted, searching major academic databases for qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods studies. Data were...
PLoS One2025Anne S. Fleiner, Daniel Kolnier, Nicholas Hagger-Vaughan et al.1 citation
Propofol and ketamine are widely used general anaesthetics, but have different effects on consciousness: propofol gives a deeply unconscious state, with little or no dream reports, whereas vivid dreams are often reported after ketamine anaesthesia. Ketamine is an N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor antagonist, while propofol is a γ-aminobutyric-acid (GABAA) receptor positive allosteric...
The article highlights the stable characteristics of the world of dreams/visions, which is revealed to Hoffmann's visionaries in borderline, «twilight» states (half-asleep, intoxication, creative ecstasy, fever). Hoffmann sees in it not a closed, escapist «other-reality» but one of the two constitutive modes of perception, which has a common denotation and a common source with the «everyday»...
Dream-like and psychedelic experiences often display internally illogical structures. Recent theories propose that these experiences function as "spontaneous offline simulations" related to specific brain processes. This study investigates whether such perceived illogicality reflects a distinct, premodern mode of cognition-commonly referred to as "mythic" cognition-rather than a cognitive...
Since the 1930s, researchers have awakened people from different stages of sleep to record what they have experienced. While some aspects, including asking whether participants had dreams or thoughts before awakening, largely remain the same, others, such as the method of awakening, vary greatly. In addition, it is often assumed that the influence of participant characteristics, such as...
Silene undulata is historically used for inducing vivid and prophetic lucid dreams, but limited information exists on its phytochemical composition and potential pharmacological properties. This study aimed to investigate the phytochemical composition of S. undulata through LC-MS/MS analysis and explore its potential serotonergic activity, which could support and confirm the traditional use of...
How is it that psychedelics so profoundly impact brain and mind? According to the model of "Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics" (REBUS), 5-HT2a agonism is thought to help relax prior expectations, thus making room for new perspectives and patterns. Here, we introduce an alternative (but largely compatible) perspective, proposing that REBUS effects may primarily correspond to a particular (but...
This essay presents the dreams of a long-term patient over the course of treatment in order to explore the transpersonal potential of the relational unconscious—those open channels of unconscious communication between people. At a key moment, the patient brings in the therapist’s own childhood dream, serving to break a period of impasse and reset the therapy. Dreams and their interpretation...
Integrated information theory (IIT) argues that the substrate of consciousness is a maximally irreducible complex of units. Together, subsets of the complex specify a cause-effect structure, composed of distinctions and their relations, which accounts in full for the quality of experience. The feeling of a specific experience is also its meaning for the subject, which is thus defined...
DMT reliably induces profound experiences of immersion in other worlds and encounters with seemingly autonomous presences, yet the lived qualities and unfolding of these experiences remain poorly understood. Using micro-phenomenological interviews with twenty-three healthy participants who received DMT during fMRI scanning, this study explores how these experiences arise and develop in...