Dream experience (DE) represents a fascinating condition linked to emotional processes and the human inner world. Although the overlap between REM sleep and dreaming has been overcome, several studies point out that emotional and perceptually vivid contents are more frequent when reported upon awakenings from this sleep stage. Actually, it is well-known that REM sleep plays a pivotal role in...
Narcolepsy is a chronic sleep disorder characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness, cataplexy, hypnagogic hallucinations, and sleep paralysis. This disease affects significantly the overall patient functioning, interfering with social, work, and affective life. Some symptoms of narcolepsy depend on emotional stimuli; for instance, cataplectic attacks can be triggered by emotional inputs such...
Chapter 7 examines a proposed evolution of human thoughts and how they can be reprocessed using SF-EMDR psychotherapy. It is widely accepted that we use only five per cent of our brain’s capacity for conscious thought. The remaining ninety-five per cent is below our level of conscious control. Various theories on the origin of consciousness are discussed in relation to Dr Stuart Hameroff and Sir...
Experimental and theoretical arguments have been described in favor of the hypothesis that the nasal cycle reversals of the nostril’s airflow occurs only in the consciousness states of the brain (during awake/wake state, REM state and during dreams in St.1, 2 of the non-REM sleep). This finding gives possibility to use nasal cycle as “marker for consciousness states”. An idea for clinical...
The author Edgar Allan Poe is one of many artists who describe how it feels to live with major, involuntary changes of consciousness. Are the large upturns and downturns in his life attributable to a neurological conditions, or can substance use and depressive thoughts explain these fluctuations?
Telepathy appears as one way of maintaining contact at critical points in the management of contradictory needs for distance and inviolability and at the same time serving the inextinguishable need for closeness and safety. The analysis of the dream did support the telepathy hypothesis. In 1960, in the course of the author&s;s last year in practice, he received a grant from the Parapsychology...
Although the dream narrative, of (bio)logical necessity, originates with the dreamer, s/he typically does not know this. For the dreamer, the dream world is the real world. In this article I argue that this nightly misattribution is best explained in terms of the concept of mental ownership (e.g., Albahari, 2006; Klein, 2015a; Lane, 2012). Specifically, the exogenous nature of the dream...
Core concepts of psychoanalysis admit integration with recent work in neuroscience and developmental psychology. Karl Friston’s free energy neuroscience embodies analogues of Freud’s primary and secondary processes, and despite conceptual differences assigns the same causal role as Freud to the minimization of free energy. This supports parallel psychoanalytic and neuroscientific accounts of...
Sleep and anesthesia entail alterations in conscious experience. Conscious experience may be absent (unconsciousness) or take the form of dreaming, a state in which sensory stimuli are not incorporated into conscious experience (disconnected consciousness). Recent work has identified features of cortical activity that distinguish conscious from unconscious states; however, less is known about...
A variety of conceptualizations and commentary as to the nature of sleep-talking are to be found mostly in diffuse and dispersed fragments in the clinical-anecdotal literature. People do not dream or sleep-talk unless something has been left awakened in their psychic activities during sleep, and the more that sleep approaches waking by imperceptible degrees, the more favourable are the...