Dream Imagery Research Articles

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 control group This dream imagery is consistent with previous findings of the dream imagery of individuals experiencing waking day anxiety, suggesting that waking day concerns about COVID-19 may be affecting individual's dream imagery In addition, the increased amount of imagery related to the virus, food, and head imagery suggests that specific aspects of COVID-19 and the global response are reflected within sleep mentation As concerns and anxieties regarding the virus are pervasive, affecting many people during both waking and sleep, it is suggested that dream interpretation may be a beneficial approach to alleviating COVID-19-related stress

An Analysis of the Similarities between The Peony Pavilion and A Midsummer Night's Dream

The Peony Pavilion and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are classic love plays created by Chinese Tang Xianzu and English William Shakespeare respectively. Their brilliant achievements in eastern and western dramatic literature have drawn widespread attention from many scholars so far. However, the comparison of the two works has not been studied enough. Although the two plays were created in China and Britain respectively, they shared a lot of similarities. This article aims to compare and analyze the two plays in terms of their setting of rebellious daughters and the tyrannical fathers and the employment of images, including dream and mythological imagery, and to demonstrate that under the influence of humanistic spirit and new cultural trends at the end of the 16th century. Tang Xianzu and Shakespeare, although living in different countries, were both committed to express the idea of opposing feudal ethics, fighting against asceticism, and advocating individual liberation. Their thoughts, together with Du Liniang and Hermia, the rebellious female characters in the plays, have influenced the literary creation of later generations. A comprehensive comparison and analysis of the two plays might help readers better understand the love thinking and ideological connotations of the two 16th-century writers in their different living environments.

Partial memory reinstatement while (lucid) dreaming to change the dream environment.

Lucid dreams often coincide with having control over dream events in real-time, although the limitations of dream control are not completely understood. The current study probed the ability of lucid dreamers to reinstate waking scene memories while dreaming. After brief exposure to an experimental scene, participants were asked to reinstate the scene while lucid dreaming (i.e., change dream scenery to match real-world scene). Qualitative analysis revealed that successful dream scene reinstatements were overwhelmingly inaccurate with respect to the original experimental scene. Importantly, reinstatement inaccuracies held even when the dreamer was aware of them during the dream, suggesting a dissociation between memory access while dreaming and dream imagery. The ability to change the environment of a dream speaks to the high amount of lucid dream control, yet the inaccuracies speak to a lack of detailed control. Reinstating context during lucid sleep offers an experimental method to investigate sleep, dreams, and memory.

Summoning Spirits, Bridging Worlds: Writing, Dreaming, Working Through

The analyst’s immersion in the act of writing about a treatment may call forth unconscious processes in the analyst that not only enhance her understanding of the treatment but also promote a therapeutic process in the analyst herself. I describe the unexpected juxtaposition of writing and dreaming that occurred when I engaged in writing about the case I present in this paper. As I channeled my experience of the treatment into words, the stories I had been told as a child unfolded on the page, while those that remained untold, their shadow-counterparts, materialized in my dreams. Giving voice and form to my as-yet unprocessed and unsymbolized experience through the interpenetrating illumination of the imagery of language and dreams enabled me to fill out the contours of my own life story and in doing so, to lay the ghosts that had come alive in the treatment to rest.

Response: Commentary: Measuring Counterintuitiveness in Supernatural Agent Dream Imagery.

Response: Commentary: Measuring Counterintuitiveness in Supernatural Agent Dream Imagery.

Commentary: Measuring Counterintuitiveness in Supernatural Agent Dream Imagery.

Commentary: Measuring Counterintuitiveness in Supernatural Agent Dream Imagery.

Ambiguity as Dream Mentation: Supermasculinity and Ambivalence in American Dreams

AbstractAmbiguity, this paper argues, is not merely a property of dream imagery, but ignites a process that is dreaming thinking. When images are ambiguous, the mind cannot fix on a single meaning. Hence dream ambiguity catalyzes a play of possible meanings that implicitly raises questions, not only about personal memories but also about those cultural models that these memories evoke. Dream thinking, then, renders people's ongoing subjective reactions to culture into images. Through data from a 2004 to 2009 study of Northwest American student dreams and life histories, I propose that people think within dreams by representing daily ambivalences as visual ambiguities. Excerpts from this dream study illustrate seven types of visual ambiguity in dreams. Implicit in this taxonomy is a method of cultural dream interpretation that I present through an analysis of a full dream from a young man, Clarence. Through this analysis I show how ambiguities in Clarence's dream represent his ambivalence about an American masculinity model—one that may underlie the school shootings that are now so common in the United States.

Measuring Counterintuitiveness in Supernatural Agent Dream Imagery.

The present article tests counterintuitiveness theory and methodology in relation to religious dream imagery using data on religious dream content. The endeavor adopts a “fractionated” or “piecemeal” approach where supernatural agent (SA) cognition is held to be a pivotal building block of purportedly religious dreaming. Such supernaturalistic conceptualizations manifest in a cognitive environment of dream simulation processes, threat detection, and violation of basic conceptual categorization characterized by counterintuitiveness. By addressing SA cognitions as constituents of allegedly religious dream imagery, additional theorizing and supporting data are presented in a growing body of research in the cognitive science of religion (e.g., Barrett et al., 2009;Hornbeck and Barrett, 2013;Barrett, 2017) and on religious dreaming (McNamara and Bulkeley, 2015;McNamara, 2016). The aim of the article is partly to map and align contemporary theorizing regarding counterintuitiveness and CI schemes with empirical qualification of the prosaic hypothesis about the predominance of supernaturalism in allegedly religious dreaming. This is done by (1) exploring the crucial topic of the pervasiveness of cognitive counterintuitiveness; (2) testing Barrett’s counterintuitiveness coding and quantifying scheme (CI scheme) for counterintuitiveness in the context of religious dreaming by assessing intercoder reliability; and (3) exploring the prevalence and base rate frequency of counterintuitiveness in dream reports. This undertaking aims to contribute to the methodology and understanding of religious dream cognition, as well as to establish the cross-cultural base rates of counterintuitiveness in dreams for future research.

Rapid eye movements are reduced in blind individuals.

There is ongoing controversy regarding the role of rapid eye movements (EMs) during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. One prevailing hypothesis is that EMs during REM sleep are indicative of the presence of visual imagery in dreams. We tested the validity of this hypothesis by measuring EMs in blind subjects and correlating these with visual dream content. Eleven blind subjects, of whom five were congenitally blind (CB) and six late blind (LB), and 11 matched sighted control (SC) subjects participated in this study. All participants underwent full-night polysomnography (PSG) recordings that were staged manually following American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) criteria. Nocturnal EMs were detected automatically using a validated EM detector, and EM activity was represented as "EM coverage" computed as percentage of time with EM in each sleep stage. Frequency of sensory dream elements was measured in dream recall questionnaires over a 30-day period. Both blind groups showed less EM coverage during wakefulness, N1, N2 and REM sleep than did controls. CB and LB subjects did not differ in EM activity. Validation of the detector applied to blind subjects revealed an overall accuracy of 95.6±3.6%. Analysis of dream reports revealed that LB subjects reported significantly more visual dream elements than did CB. Although no specific mechanisms can be revealed in the current study, the quasi absence of nocturnal EMs in LB subjects despite preserved visual dream content does not support the visual scanning of dreams hypothesis. Specifically, results suggest a dissociation between EMs and visual dream content in blind individuals.

EEG predictors of dreaming outside of REM sleep.

The stream of human consciousness persists during sleep, albeit in altered form. Disconnected from external input, the mind and brain remain active, at times creating the bizarre sequences of thought and imagery that comprise "dreaming." Yet despite substantial effort toward understanding this unique state of consciousness, no reliable neurophysiological indicator of dreaming has been discovered. Here, we identified electroencephalographic (EEG) correlates of dreaming using a within-subjects design to characterize the EEG preceding awakenings from sleep onset, REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, and N2 (NREM Stage 2) sleep from which participants were asked to report their mental experience. During the transition into sleep, compared to periods during which participants reported thinking, emergence of dream imagery was associated with increased absolute power below 7Hz. During later N2, dreaming conversely occurred during periods of decreased relative power below 1Hz, accompanied by an increase in relative power above 4Hz. No EEG predictors of dreaming were identified during REM. These observations suggest an inverted-U relationship between dreaming and the prevalence of low-frequency EEG rhythms, such that dreaming first emerges in concert with EEG slowing during the sleep-wake transition, but then disappears as high-amplitude slow oscillations come to dominate the recording during later N2 sleep.

Can a microdynamic approach to sleep-onset imagery solve the overabundance problem of dreaming? Commentary on Tore Nielsen's "Microdream neurophenomenology".

Nielsen proposes that a microdynamic approach to experiences occurring in the earliest stages of sleep onset, which he calls microdreams, can shed light on the process of dream imagery formation. I discuss microdreams in the context of simulation views, in which dreaming is defined as the immersive experience of a virtual world centered on a virtual self. I also evaluate his proposal to expand the dimensions included in the oneiragogic spectrum by kinesis. I conclude that while a subset of microdreams might not fulfill the conditions to count as even minimal dreams, their investigation can nonetheless help address key questions in dream research and may even constitute a distinctive pathway to the generation of full-fledged dreaming.

A destination imagery processing model: Structural differences between dream and favourite destinations

The present paper aims at understanding how destination imagery is processed in tourists’ working memory. The research focuses on two highly desirable, but contrasting, destination brand categories: Favourite Destination, which involves retrospective memory of positive experiences in situ; and Dream Destination, based on tourists’ prospective memory. Through an online multilingual survey, 23,446 responses consisting of perceptions, evoked by way of free-recall, associated to Dream and Favourite Destinations, were collected. Findings point to clear structural differences between the imagery of Dream and Favourite Destinations. Additionally, a theoretical destination imagery model that offers a basis for future studies is proposed, and some managerial implications of significant relevance to destination marketing are discussed.

A distant dream: Balthus, Henri Michaux, and the Chinese aesthetic tradition

This article examines the relation between twentieth-century artists Balthus, Henri Michaux, and Chinese painting and poetic imagery. The constant echo of a seemingly “Chinese aesthetics” in Balthus’s and Michaux’s works gives rise to a few important questions. How do Balthus’s and Michaux’s creative practices and works engage with and re-invent the Chinese aesthetic tradition? What new understandings of Balthus and Michaux will be revealed if they are seen in the light of Chinese notions about painting, calligraphy, and poetic imagery? What would this say about the relation between artistic influence and creativity, especially in the case of the transformation of aesthetic forms and ideas across cultures and time? By discussing how Balthus’s figurative and landscape paintings relate to the Zhuangzi’s dream imagery and Song dynasty shanshui (mountain–water) paintings, and how Michaux’s ink paintings are integrated into his critical endeavor to break away from Orientalist stereotypes, it is argued that both artists are transformed by the Chinese aesthetic tradition, as well as actively transform how it is understood.

Dream Imagery and Rapid Eye Movement

Dream Imagery and Rapid Eye Movement

Predictive brains, dreaming selves, sleeping bodies: how the analysis of dream movement can inform a theory of self- and world-simulation in dreams

In this paper, I discuss the relationship between bodily experiences in dreams and the sleeping, physical body. I question the popular view that dreaming is a naturally and frequently occurring real-world example of cranial envatment. This view states that dreams are functionally disembodied states: in a majority of dreams, phenomenal experience, including the phenomenology of embodied selfhood, unfolds completely independently of external and peripheral stimuli and outward movement. I advance an alternative and more empirically plausible view of dreams as weakly phenomenally-functionally embodied states. The view predicts that bodily experiences in dreams can be placed on a continuum with bodily illusions in wakefulness. It also acknowledges that there is a high degree of variation across dreams and different sleep stages in the degree of causal coupling between dream imagery, sensory input, and outward motor activity. Furthermore, I use the example of movement sensations in dreams and their relation to outward muscular activity to develop a predictive processing account. I propose that movement sensations in dreams are associated with a basic and developmentally early kind of bodily self-sampling. This account, which affords a central role to active inference, can then be broadened to explain other aspects of self- and world-simulation in dreams. Dreams are world-simulations centered on the self, and important aspects of both self- and world-simulation in dreams are closely linked to bodily self-sampling, including muscular activity, illusory own-body perception, and vestibular orienting in sleep. This is consistent with cognitive accounts of dream generation, in which long-term beliefs and expectations, as well as waking concerns and memories play an important role. What I add to this picture is an emphasis on the real-body basis of dream imagery. This offers a novel perspective on the formation of dream imagery and suggests new lines of research.

Manifest Dream Content as a Predictor of Suicidality.

A number of behavioral, social, biological, and cultural factors are associated with suicide. However, the ability to predict an imminent suicide attempt remains problematic. Prior studies indicate that the manifest dream content of depressed, non-suicidal patients differs from that of depressed, suicidal patients. The dream imagery of depressed, suicidal patients contains themes of death, dying, violence, and departure. The dream imagery of depressed, non-suicidal patients contains themes of rejection, helplessness, hopelessness, humiliation, failure, and loss. In the present study, the dream reports of 52 depressed patients were collected and rated for various themes. Patients were divided into three groups: Depressed and non-suicidal; Depressed, with suicidal ideation; Depressed, with suicidal ideation and/or attempt(s). Themes of death and/or dying, and to a lesser extent, themes of violence, injury, and/or murder occurred with greater frequency in the dream reports of depressed patients with suicidal ideation and/or attempts, than in the dream reports of depressed patients without suicidal ideation or behavior. These observations correspond with the prevailing psychodynamic explanation of suicide; namely, that it is a murderous attack on the self that is identified with hated internalized objects.

Dream content of Canadian males from adolescence to old age: An exploration of ontogenetic patterns.

The present study was a first look at the ontogenetic pattern of dream content across the lifespan for men. The participants included 50 Canadian men in each of 5 age groups, from adolescence to old age including 12-17, 18-24, 25-39, 40-64, and 65-85. The last age group included 31 participants, totaling 231 males. One dream per participant was scored by two independent judges using content analysis. Trend analysis was used to determine the lifespan-developmental pattern of the dream content categories. Results demonstrated a predominance of aggressive dream imagery in the adolescent age group in line with social-developmental research. These patterns of dream imagery reflect the waking developmental patterns as proposed by social theories and recognized features of aging. Limitations and suggestions for future research, including the examining of the developmental pattern of gender differences across the lifespan, are discussed.

Актуальные проблемы теории литературных сновидений и методика их изучения на современном этапе

In the work classical methods of interpretation of dreams are considered. The article gives examples from theoretical literary and pedagogical works of Russian humanitarian thought. The range of points of view is wide enough for a brief study: philosophy, literary history, literary psychoanalysis. The importance of national methodical thought is especially significant in comparison with the works of leading researchers of modern science. An attempt is made to comprehend the boundaries of the study of dreams in literature and to determine the prospects for the scientific comprehension of the artistic imagery of dreams on the example of the last period of Russian classical literature

A interpretação dos sonhos no Corpus hippocraticum: o Da dieta IV

<p>Apresenta-se aqui o livro IV do tratado <em>Da dieta</em>, na forma de uma tradução inédita ao português daquele que pode ser considerado o primeiro catálogo de sonhos de que se tem registro. Acompanham a tradução algumas considerações a respeito dos capítulos que compõem o livro, ressaltando-se ali conceitos-chave para a sua leitura. A interpretação dos sonhos nesse tratado se apresenta como um método para o conhecimento do corpo. Trata-se de um mapeamento das perturbações do corpo codificadas e decodificadas em imagens a partir de uma relação micro-macrocósmica que o autor define como <em>apomímesis toû hólou</em>. A imagética do sonho contida no tratado conforma um campo semântico específico, próprio da <em>iatrikè tékhne</em>, diferenciando-se das outras <em>tékhnai</em> que do sonho se valem.</p><div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p><span>This paper presents an original translation into Portuguese of that which could be considered the first book of dreams: book IV of hippocratic treatise </span><span>De victu</span><span>. Following the translation, some considerations on the book composition and chapters, emphasizing some key concepts that guide the translation hereby presented. Dream interpretation on this treatise can be understood as a method of body knowledge. Body disorders are mapped, coded and decoded into images that respond to a micro-macrocosmic relation, defined by the treatise author as an </span><span>apomímesis toû hólou</span><span>. Dream imagery in this treatise configurates a specific semantic field of the </span><span>iatrikè tékhne</span><span>, differenciating itself from others </span><span>tékhnai </span><span>that also make use of dreams. </span></p><p><strong>Keywords: </strong><span>Hippocratic Corpus</span><span>; Diet; Dreams; </span><span>Apomímesis </span></p></div></div></div>

Phenomenal consciousness in dreams and in mind wandering

Dreaming can be explained as the product of an interaction among memory processes, elaborative processes, and phenomenal awareness. A feedback circuit is activated by this interaction according to the associative links and the requirements of the dream scene. Recently, it has been hypothesized that a partial similarity exists between dreaming and mind wandering and that these two processes may involve the same neural default network. This commentary discusses the differences and similarities between phenomenal consciousness during dreaming and phenomenal consciousness during mind wandering from the perspective of the “continuity” of engagement of cognitive systems. The greatest difference consists in the lack of reality testing during dreaming. Dream imagery is hallucinatory by nature. Consequently, the simulated world in dreams makes dream imagery more akin to perception. In contrast, the imagery of mind wandering is more similar to imagination. The level of meta-awareness is preserved more frequently and to a greater degree in mind wandering.