Why do people sometimes report that they remember dreams, while at other times they recall no experience? Despite the interest in dreams that may happen during the night, it has remained unclear which brain states determine whether these conscious experiences will occur and what prevents us from waking up during these episodes. Here we address this issue by comparing the EEG activity preceding...
In rapid eye movement (REM) dreams elements are taken out of their waking-life context and associated to portray a complex, non-obvious pattern in experience. In the last chapter we looked at this process as insight into a hidden pattern; here, we focus on the novel nature of the pattern. A series of dream scenes creates a narrative that has not been experienced. REM dream narratives are new,...
The thesis of my paper – evolving out the abstract submitted months ago – is that our lingering ethnocentric reification of “dreaming” as not just distinct from but the opposite of “waking” – dream consciousness versus waking consciousness – elides and occludes much power and value in and across mental states that include dreaming. There is arguably a strong connection if not continuum across...
Sci-fi has had a lot to say about dreaming over the years: film director Christopher Nolan, fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, anime director Satoshi Kon, and many others have explored the weird and wonderful world of dreams. Inception begins with the premise that it’s possible to enter someone’s dream and extract information from their mind. In the first experiment of its kind, a research team led...
Dreams are experiences that occur during sleep, while we are disconnected from the environment. Thanks to recent progress in neuroimaging techniques, it is now becoming possible to relate dream features to specific patterns of brain activity. Some conditions occurring in patients with neurological disorders, such as lucid dreams and parasomnias, not only have diagnostic value, but also offer a...
Abstract Aphantasia is a recently discovered disorder characterised by the total incapacity to generate visual forms of mental imagery. This paper proposes that aphantasia raises important theoretical concerns for the ongoing debate in the philosophy and science of consciousness over the nature of dreams. Recent studies of aphantasia and its neurobehavioral correlates reveal that the majority...
Immortality is thought to be achieved through heroic deeds, reincarnation, and the afterlife. The present studies reveal an alternative path to transcending death: dying while conscious. Seven studies demonstrate that dying while more awake, aware and/or lucid leads people to see a richer postmortem mind-an effect we call conservation of consciousness. People see more mind in the deceased when...
Ghost encounters were found to be a key part of the trauma ontology among Cambodian refugees at a psychiatric clinic, a key idiom of distress. Fifty-four percent of patients had been bothered by ghost encounters in the last month. The severity of being bothered by ghosts in the last month was highly correlated to PTSD severity (r = .8), and among patients bothered by ghosts in the last month,...
PsyArXivAugust 19, 2020Debbie Margaretha Louisa De Boer, Patrick Johnston, Graham Kerr et al.
preprint
Recent theories suggest that self-consciousness, in its most elementary form, is separate from the own body. Patients with psychosis frequently misattribute their thoughts and actions to external sources; and in certain out-of-body experiences, lucid states, and dreams body-ownership is absent but self-identification is preserved. We hypothesized that self-identification depends on inferring...
This chapter covers basic knowledge about the psychology of dreams, precisely the importance of keeping a Dream Journal, the definition of the existential message of dreams and a list of dream types and their functions, giving systematically one real-life example for each dream type. Among the dream types are: Symbolic dreams; Clear dreams; Hypnagogic dreams; Initial dreams; Nightmares; Anxiety...