We dream about typical themes in both REM and non-REM sleep.
This study examined whether typical dream themes would occur in both REM and non-REM (NREM) sleep. The sample consisted of 15 participants, who spent 3 consecutive nights at a sleep laboratory. A total of 219 awakenings and sleep interviews were conducted in the second and third laboratory nights, resulting in 133 interviews with mentation reports. Apart from free-recall reports collected via sleep interviews, the participants were asked next morning to recognize any typical themes occurring in each episode of REM/NREM mentation using a provided list of dream themes. It was found that slightly more than half of the mentati...
Source: Dreaming - December 31, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
A midsummer night’s dream: Shakespeare’s play of dreaming.
Dreaming is a central theme in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This essay explores his classic work using a broad interdisciplinary theory of dreaming that combines Freudian and Jungian views with insights from anthropology, religious studies, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and cognitive psychology. This theory proposes that dreaming is a kind of play, the play of the imagination during sleep. The dreaming-is-play approach sheds new light on Titania’s serpent nightmare, Bottom’s erotic fantasy, Puck’s magical mischief in sleep, and other dream-related themes. The goal is not to translate or ...
Source: Dreaming - December 31, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Inducing lucid dreams: The wake-up-back-to-bed technique in the home setting.
Lucid dreams occur quite rarely, so research has focused on different induction methods to increase lucid dream frequency. In the sleep laboratory setting the wake-up-back-to-bed (WBTB) technique in combination with the mnemonic induction of lucid dreams (MILD) technique is very effective. The present study with N = 50 participants in line with previous studies - indicates that these techniques are also effective at home with a lucid dream percentage of 18% after WBTB nights compared to 6% after non-WBTB nights. Of the 10 naïve participants who had never had a lucid dream before, 50% experienced at least one lucid dream d...
Source: Dreaming - December 31, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Dream journaling: Stability and relation to personality factors.
Cross-sectional surveys have indicated that about 5% of the survey participants recorded their dreams at least once a month. Studies have shown that dream recording is related to dream recall frequency, openness to experience, and low conscientiousness, indicating a distinct personality type of dream journalists. The findings of the first longitudinal study (N = 739 persons; 429 woman, 310 men; Mage: 48.76 ± 15.16 years) over a 2-year period on this topic indicate that dream recording is a very stable trait and that the 3 variables (dream recall frequency, openness to experience, and low conscientiousness) are still relat...
Source: Dreaming - September 24, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Assessing the dream-lag effect among participants with different intuition score measured by the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator.
This study investigates whether intuition measured by the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator can influence participants’ ratings for the dream-lag effect. In total, 56 participants kept a diary for 7 days, reporting personally significant events and major concerns, and recorded their dreams in the 7th day night. Then they rated the level of matching between dreams and daily diary items. The dream-lag effect was found among the intuitive types, but not the sensing types. Furthermore, this effect was found only for the incorporation of personally significant events and not for major concerns. This suggested that the intuitive t...
Source: Dreaming - September 24, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Conscious use of dreams in waking life (nontherapy setting) for decision-making, problem-solving, attitude formation, and behavioral change.
The study explored to what extent dreams have been perceived as being helpful in waking life. More specifically, for “important” waking life (conscious) decision-making, the solving of emotional or nonemotional (practical/technical/work-related) problems, forming/changing an attitude about something or somebody, or a conscious behavioral change of the dreamer (N = 667). On a general level, 62,1% of participants indicated that dreams at some point had been of help or good use (regression analysis found a strong association with dream attitude, measured on Dream Attitude Scale [DAS]). Most often mentioned areas of help w...
Source: Dreaming - September 24, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Achieving pain during lucid dreaming and transferring it into wakefulness.
During lucid dreaming, people experience vivid perceptions and emotions that may have a psychophysiological impact after the person awakens. The goal of this research is to test whether it is possible to create pain during lucid dreaming and maintain it upon awakening. For this study, 151 volunteers completed a task in which they needed to achieve pain during lucid dreams (LD) and then wake up. They then checked whether the pain from the dream remained after they awoke, and, if so, they reported how long the pain lasted. Of the participants, 74% experienced pain during LD and 28% of them continued feeling the pain after wa...
Source: Dreaming - September 24, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Lucid dreaming: Effects of culture in a U.S. American sample.
Lucid dreaming is defined as a dream in which an individual becomes consciously aware that s/he is dreaming while dreaming. Concepts about lucid dreaming vary strongly in different cultures. The present survey was completed by 3,992 Americans 18 years and older in age (2,310 women and 1,682 men), with a mean age of 48.26 ± 17.09 years. Lucid dream occurrence in the total sample was 35.72%, with Hispanic participants reporting a significantly lower frequency of lucid dreams compared with White participants, a difference that might reflect a greater prominence of lucid dreaming in more individualistic cultures versus more c...
Source: Dreaming - September 24, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Pandemic dreaming: The effect of COVID-19 on dream imagery, a pilot study.
COVID-19 has changed the way that people around the world live their lives, consequentially spurring various mental health difficulties. The current study aimed to determine whether people experienced distinct dream imagery during the early phase of the pandemic in Canada. The dreams of Canadian university students were recorded for 2 weeks during the beginning of Canada’s experience with COVID-19. The dream imagery was analyzed and compared to a control group; t tests show that the COVID-19 group had significantly more imagery of location changes, animal, head, food, and virus-related dream imagery compared to the contr...
Source: Dreaming - September 24, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Dreams about COVID-19 versus normative dreams: Trends by gender.
Dreams about the COVID-19 pandemic were collected from 2,888 dreamers via an online survey and compared to normative dreams from an earlier period. A total of 9 categories of emotions and body concerns from the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) were utilized. As predicted by the continuity hypothesis of dreaming, women showed significantly lower positive emotions in their dreams and higher rates of negative emotions, anxiety, sadness, anger, body content, references to biological processes, health, and death. For male respondents, the predicted higher score for the LIWC variable health was the only one significant a...
Source: Dreaming - September 24, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Dreaming in the time of COVID-19: A quali-quantitative Italian study.
Based on the continuity hypothesis of dreaming with waking life, we have studied the effects of isolation on the dreams of Italian persons, during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic. The present study included a sample of 796 subjects (73.2% women; ages 18–79 years, M = 30.3, SD = 12.8). Participants were asked to complete a dream questionnaire, as well as to report their most recent dream, by responding to specific questions related to the content of their dream (e.g., realism/bizarreness, positive vs. negative emotions, emotional intensity and tone). Results indicate the following: Female participants were higher recall...
Source: Dreaming - September 24, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Dreaming and the COVID-19 pandemic: A survey in a U.S. sample.
This study analyzes the responses of 3,031 U.S. adults who, in early May of 2020, completed an online survey regarding their dreams and the COVID-19 outbreak. The results indicate that those people most strongly affected by the pandemic also reported the strongest effects on their dream life (heightened dream recall, more negatively toned dreams, and pandemic-related dreams). Pronounced negative effects of the pandemic on dreaming were also found to be more likely among women and people with higher levels of education. These findings support the notion that changes in the frequency, tone, and contents of dreaming can help ...
Source: Dreaming - September 24, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Examining the triggers of lucid insight.
Approximately half the population have experienced a lucid dream. Yet, it is not well understood how an individual realizes they are dreaming (i.e., lucid insight). A few studies suggest it can be triggered by a nightmare, or by the identification of inconsistencies/dream-like qualities/peculiarities. The present study aimed to produce a detailed typology of lucidity triggers to inform consideration of the nature of associated thought processes. A total of 91 lucid dreamers were identified in an undergraduate sample of 148. Lucid dreamers were asked to describe what it was, if anything, that had made them realize they were...
Source: Dreaming - June 1, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Nightmares in adult psychiatric inpatients with and without history of interpersonal trauma.
Nightmares are a prevalent problem among trauma survivors and can cause significant impairment in well-being and daily functioning. Exposure to interpersonal trauma is associated with increased severity of posttraumatic symptoms, including nightmares, and greater likelihood of developing posttraumatic stress disorder. Furthermore, nightmares are one of the few symptoms that may persist in the years following a traumatic event. The aims of this study were to assess whether patients’ nightmares respond differently to treatment as usual and to determine whether exposure to different traumas was associated with treatment-res...
Source: Dreaming - May 18, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
From adolescence to young adulthood in two dream series: The consistency and continuity of characters and major personal interests.
Based on several past studies of lengthy daily individual dream series, which are an unobtrusive, nonreactive archival measure, free of any demand characteristics, it has been established with adults over age 25 that dream content is consistent over years and even decades. In addition, dream content is often continuous with waking personal concerns as well, whether the concerns are positive (“interests,” “avocations”) or negative (“worries,” “preoccupations”; Domhoff, 2018, Chapters 3–4, for summaries of this work). The study presented in this article is a descriptive empirical investigation that explores...
Source: Dreaming - May 7, 2020 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
