Lucid music – A pilot study exploring the experiences and potential of music-making in lucid dreams.
In a lucid dream, the dreamer knows that he or she is dreaming and can thus deliberately carry out actions. The original goal of this study was to investigate musical practice in lucid dreams and its possible effects as well as the quality of the experiences. A total of 5 musicians were interviewed about their lucid dreams in which they had played instruments and sung. However, the interviewees were more interested in pleasure and inspiration than in actual practice and skill improvement. Therefore, the results provide more general information than planned. It could be shown that singing and playing musical instruments mos...
Source: Dreaming - May 24, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The dreams of monks: Studies on Chinese Buddhists’ dream content.
The present study is a comparison of dream content between monks and nonreligious respondents, aiming to understand the unconscious of monks, and to further explore the influence of religion on our human mind. The authors interviewed participants to collect dreams and then explored similarities and differences through content analysis. A total of 127 participants reported their dreams, 65 monks and 62 nonreligious respondents. Results suggest a significant difference in dream themes between monks and nonreligious respondents. Compared with nonreligious respondents, there were more “prediction” and “revelation” them...
Source: Dreaming - May 21, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
“Room, door. . . room”: Oneiric space in L’Avventura and Last Year in Marienbad.
Cinema and dreams inhabit the same psychoemotional realm. This essay was written to explore this connection by marrying studies in dream psychology to avant-garde film theory. To do this, the essay provides a critical analysis of scenes from Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (Pennasilico & Antonioni, 1960) and Alain Resnais’s L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Courau, Froment, Dorfmann, Dauman, & Resnais, 1961). Research is built from an instructive critical landscape focusing on the ongoing tensions between the spatial, oneirological explorations of film, as used in J. Allan Hobson’s studies on REM sleep cycles...
Source: Dreaming - May 21, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Letting go of the ego: Dreams about ego-centered concerns as a function of adversity, Taoist orientation, and locus of control.
This study examined the extent to which dream themes characteristic of ego-centered concerns could be accounted for by Taoist orientation, with consideration of self-perceived adversity and locus of control. The sample contained 242 participants, 111 university students and 131 nonstudent participants. Participants’ incidence of dreaming of ego-centered concerns, Taoist orientation, and locus of control was measured using the Dream Motif Scale; the Ego-Grasping Orientation Scale; and the Internality, Powerful Others, and Chance Scales, respectively. The results suggest that the incidence of dreaming of ego-centered conce...
Source: Dreaming - April 2, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Book preferences and nightmares: The U.K. library study.
Nightmares are defined as disturbing mental experiences that generally occur during REM sleep and often result in awakening. The continuity hypothesis of dreaming would predict that media consumption arousing anxious feelings might increase nightmare frequency. Whereas there is some research on the effect of watching TV and playing computer games on dreams, research examining the relationship between reading and nightmares is scarce. The present study carried out in 3,535 children and adolescents showed that the preference for reading scary stories is positively related to nightmare frequency, whereas preferring fiction (n...
Source: Dreaming - April 2, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Are dreams social simulations? Or are they enactments of conceptions and personal concerns? An empirical and theoretical comparison of two dream theories.
This article compares social simulation theory, which claims that dreaming is a rehearsal for waking social perceptions and interactions, and therefore has adaptive value (Revonsuo, Tuominen, & Valli, 2015), with a neurocognitive theory of dreaming, which claims dreaming is an intensified form of mind-wandering that makes use of embodied simulation, primarily to enact the dreamer’s major conceptions and personal concerns, but has no adaptive value (Domhoff, 2011). The article presents new findings on types of embodied simulations in dream reports, 6.5% of which are not social simulations according to social simulation th...
Source: Dreaming - April 2, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Using the LIWC program to study dreams.
This article presents the results of an analysis of a large set of dream reports (N = 5,208) using the Linguistic Inventory and Word Count (LIWC) system of Pennebaker, Boyd, Jordan, and Blackburn (2015). The findings indicate that, in comparison with other kinds of texts studied by LIWC, dream reports are distinctive in having high frequencies of the following language categories: focus on the past, first-person singular words, personal pronouns, authenticity, dictionary words, motion, space, and home. The dream reports have relatively low frequencies of these LIWC categories: informal language, focus on the present, assen...
Source: Dreaming - March 8, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Media use and gender relationship to the nightmare protection hypothesis: A cross-cultural analysis.
Chinese and Canadian people answered surveys in their native languages about their self-construal, media use history, and dreaming experiences. This included reporting a recent dream. The nightmare protection thesis was investigated. Sex was found to be modulated by culture in terms of the relationship between types of media used and negative dream content. This was particularly evident for men in Greater China versus Canada along the self-construal dimension of interdependence. As both cultures reported no difference in independent self-construal, it was argued that it is the role of interdependence that accounts for male...
Source: Dreaming - March 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Nightmare experience in bipolar I and II disorders.
Some patients with bipolar disorder have traumatic experience, sleep disturbance, and emotional variations, which are related to nightmare reports in clinics. We hypothesized that the nightmare experience might present some uniqueness in different types of bipolar disorder. We invited 200 healthy volunteers and 141 bipolar disorder I (BD I) and 78 bipolar disorder II (BD II) patients who had at least one nightmare lifelong to undergo tests of the Nightmare Experience Questionnaire (NEQ) and the questionnaires measuring mania, hypomania, and depression. Compared with healthy controls, both BD I and BD II patients displayed ...
Source: Dreaming - March 1, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Metaphoric and associative aftereffects of impactful dreams.
The proposal that impactful dreaming is “involuntary poetry” suggests that some dreams facilitate creative thinking and have aesthetic aftereffects. In two online studies (n = 107 and 117), participants completed three tasks immediately after awakening from a dream: (a) an index of metaphoric creativity, (b) a measure of the interactive combination of associative fluency and restraint, and (c) a version of the Remote Associates Test. Results indicated that, after existential dreams (Studies 1 and 2) and perhaps transcendent dreams (Study 2), participants who reported dissociative absorption provided higher scores on th...
Source: Dreaming - January 1, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Now an invasion by a Freudian concept-snatcher: Reply to Erdelyi.
This article provides a detailed reply to a Freudian-oriented critique of “The invasion of the concept snatchers: The origins, distortions, and future of the continuity hypothesis” (Domhoff, 2017). According to the critique, the continuity hypothesis (the idea that most dreams enact the same concerns present in waking thought) is old hat, going back to the 19th century, and furthermore was a part of Freud’s thinking. This reply suggests that the critic often misunderstands what is said in the original article and that all of his substantive criticisms are wrong. Academic psychologists have rejected every substantive ...
Source: Dreaming - December 28, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The continuity hypothesis.
A longstanding tradition exists, surveyed by Freud in the opening pages of his Interpretation of Dreams, holding that dream life is continuous with awake life. Contrary to Domhoff (2017), Freud partook of this tradition, and Calvin Hall, who was much influenced by Freud, articulated the idea in 1971 (with A. Bell) as “the continuity hypothesis.” A decade later, with Domhoff’s collaboration, “personal preoccupations and concerns” (and, sometimes, “interests”), extending over years, became the focus of the continuity hypothesis, which Domhoff seeks to make the exclusive defining feature of the hypothesis. It is...
Source: Dreaming - December 28, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Empirical research and literature review of the experimental and systematic study of dreams in the late 19th and early 20th century: The important role of general psychology.
The aim of this work is to bring out the historiographical categorization and periodization of the studies on dreams between the late 19th and early 20th century. The study is divided into different stages: bibliographic research, content analysis, and statistical analysis. For bibliographic research, we selected 315 studies written between 1872 and 1940 and published in PsycInfo, the database of the American Psychological Association. We assigned each work to specific categories (psychological and physical disorders, general psychology, psychoanalytical theory, physiological psychology, and other categories). Each of thes...
Source: Dreaming - December 28, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Nightmares, abjection, and American not-quite identities.
In evolutionary theory, nightmares simulate threats to survival (Revonsuo, 2006). Many nightmares, this article argues, more likely simulate threats to social identity symbolized as threats to survival. In daily life, people experience major identity threats as abjection, a state in which they feel their self-presentation is a charade. Such feelings come from aspiring to an ideal associated with an internalized cultural model that people doubt they can realize as a plausible social identity, often because of their ambivalence about this ideal. Nightmares dramatize these feelings as well as think about and comment on them t...
Source: Dreaming - December 28, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Theorizing about the continuity between waking and dreaming: Comment on Domhoff (2017).
In his article “The Invasion of the Concept Snatchers: The Origins, Distortions, and Future of the Continuity Hypothesis,” Domhoff (2017) advocated a cognitive version of the continuity hypothesis. This commentary challenges his claim that his deviations from the original continuity hypothesis formulated by Hall and Nordby (1972) are the only way to advance the theoretical framework of the continuity hypothesis. Furthermore, Domhoff’s concepts are not well operationalized; that is, reliable instruments for measuring the occurrence, intensity, and time frame of personal concerns and preoccupations are lacking. As Domh...
Source: Dreaming - November 9, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
