Hot answers tagged dreams
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As far as I know, there is no accepted science to dream interpretation. In fact, there's no science to it at all. Evidence has shown that indeed, dreaming draws material from people, places, and things in our lives, but there's absolutely no scientific data out there (that I'm familiar with) that links dreams to anything meaningful in our actual daily lives.
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7
Antonio, Nielsen and Doneri (1998) provide one assessment of self-reported prevalence of smell in dreams. To quote the abstract (my bolding):
Although numerous studies have investigated the content of
laboratory and home dream reports, surprisingly little is known
about the prevalence of various sensory modes in dreams. 49 men and
115 women ...
5
I am not aware of any study that specifically addresses dream recall, but there is a growing literature about "memory reconsolidation" or "post-reactivation plasticity", the idea that memory reactivation (recall) can temporarily return a memory to a state of high fragility and susceptibility to interference, after which a process similar to consolidation ...
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It seems that it is still a matter of debate whether animals are capable of mind wandering. For instance, there are a lot of publications about foresight, a future directed instance of mind wandering. Much of it comes from one group, e.g.,
Suddendorf T, Corballis MC. (2007) The evolution of foresight: What is
mental time travel, and is it unique to ...
4
Also, in Oliver Sack's The Man Who Mistook His For His Wife, the author and famous neurologist reports a case about a man who dreamed he had the olfactory powers of a dog; however, when he awoke, he still retained his heightened sense of smell and furthermore could prove it to the nurses.
Any experience that one has in waking life can be recapitulated ...
4
The University of Adelaide has a lot of information concerning inconsistent images:
http://www.hss.adelaide.edu.au/philosophy/inconsistent-images/
There are also a few of those on this page:
http://www.hss.adelaide.edu.au/philosophy/inconsistent-images/galleries/#sl
3
Dreams and nightmares often relate to thoughts, worries, and concerns that a person has during waking hours. Various theories both describe this phenomena and suggest reasons for this (e.g., activation of memories, memory consolidation, discarding information, working through issues). Thus, it seems plausible that someone with a particular phobia would be ...
3
As far as I know, dreams are meaningless information, strung into a story or series of events and interpretation are therefore highly subjective. The theory that I know best is that dreams are a result of memory consolidation during sleep. Of course, this is still controversial.
Memory consolidation is explained (simple version) as follows:
during ...
3
EDIT: To address the changed question:
Similar to how mental visualization stimulates the same neurons/blood flow that actually seeing something does, I suspect that brain scans will show similar processing occuring during the dream interaction as occur during real interactions.
The difference is that the brain is creating the entire subjective ...
2
I was influenced by this lecture. I will jump ahead to the pertinent part:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ei6wFJ9kCc&t=59m20s
My interpretation is that there are two general areas in the brain responsible for memory formation: 1) hippocampus and 2) basal ganglia. According to the speaker, a study shows a direct correlation between the amount of ...
2
Probably just a part of the story, but the locus coeruleus is known to be implied in the wake-sleep cycle.
Furthermore, an experiment on cats demonstrated that removing this structure cause actual (but nonsensical) behaviors replacing normal REM sleep phases: cats have no more REM sleep and instead hunt non-existing rats (or something else who knows).
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2
I will take a stab at this question, because lucid dreaming is somewhat of an area of expertise of mine.
The first thing that you will notice as you explore the lucid dreaming is that the phenomenon is poorly recognized by modern sleep science. There are hundreds of articles that use scientific methods to study sleep disorders, like sleep apneas, restless ...
1
If you are searching specific part of the brain, I think that frontal regions of cortex will be an answer(In particular, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which was associated with self-focused metacognitive evaluation). But, as it common in real life, becoming aware of dreaming state required coordinated work of different parts of brain.
You can read this ...
1
We could have scientific clinical study of the reports of dreams. Given that the dreams don't relate to specific real world events and often have very bizarre properties there's no reason to believe the report has much to do with what really happened. Therefore, from a clinicians standpoint they're useful in that you're in a relaxed state when they occur ...
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