Paranormal Dreaming

Research conducted with blind studies has provided results that people can accurately dream about events or other people, or, that people can dream about a future event. What is the next step in this research to show that these phenomena are global and stable?

Ontogenetic Patterns in Female Dreams

Current reseach by Allyson Dale at Ottawa University exams the pattern of female dreams across their lifespan. This study has an N=375 from adolescence to old age. What would be the value of this study and what are the long-term implications of the findings?

Gaming and Dreams

Research by Gackenback et al (2007) found that the continuity hypothesis of dreaming was supported with gamers. That is, that what people do in the day will show up as imagery in their dreams. The more emotionally salient the waking day events, the more likely people will dream about the events as imagery. Can there be any long-term effects of this phenomena with respect to gaming and if so, how might that occur? Also, are there benefits or detriments expected from this?

Dream Intensity

One of the important indicators of dreams is the "intensity" of the imagery and emotions. This function is important because it triggers waking day connections for the dreamer, it provides important information to researchers about the dream, and is a function that can be explored for clinical purposes. Calvin Yu (2010) published the Dream Intensity Profile which is a scale useful for evaluating components of dream intensity as clinical markers. This research provided strong evidence that the scale of dream intensity can predict specific disorders. Comment on this finding and how research should progress in terms of clinic applicablity.

Current Study

A current study examined sleep mentation (dreaming) during NREM (non-rapid eye movement) sleep in relation to brain activation (measured using functional imaging). The general findings suggested that by using machine-learning models for decoding neural activation, it is possible to determine the content of dream imagery by examining brain activation (Horikawa, Tamaki, Miyawaki, & Kamitani, 2013). How might this be useful in research, clinical practice, or popular culture?

The Storytelling Method

The Storytelling Method of dream interpretation has been used as a dream therapy to decrease negative dream imagery and nightmares with cancer patients, pain patients, soldiers returning from war, people with anxiety and depression, recovering alcoholics, and with relationship issues. It has been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Chinese so it can be used in therapy with these languages. What would be the next logical step for expanding this therapeutic tool in terms of research and practice?

Dreams, Depression, Anxiety and Meditation

Recent research conducted by Nicolle Miller examined the effect of meditation on dream imagery and waking day anxiety and depression levels. In her study she measured depression and anxiety levels as well as had people record one dream. She then taught them how to meditate and instructed them to meditate in a basic way for 10 minutes twice per day for one week. Results showed that mood changed over one week and dream imagery also changed. Preliminatry findings from this study suggest that mood can be regulated to some degree with meditation and the mood is also reflected in dreams. How might this be helpful and what are the next steps for this research?

About Dream Dictionaries.......

While dream dictionaries are fun to read and fun to consult, they do not have any grounding in reseach methods nor have they been found to accurately reflect a dreamer's waking life. Though we all would like it to be that easy, that we just look up an image and get it's meaning, we have to actually do a dream interpretation on our own dream imagery to get meaning. For example, if a phobic person dreams of dogs and a dog lover dreams of dogs then each person will have a different meaning attached to that image. One may have the meaning of "fear" but the other will have the meaning of "love". We just cannot have a list of images and their meanings in a global way. Therefore, in clinical and applied practice we only use scientifically tested dream interpretations to gain meaning from our dreams and we never tell other people what their dreams mean. We ensure that they do the interpretation for themselves. Given this information, how is The Storytelling Method of Dream Interpretation helpful in clinical practice and for use by the general public? Please respond to the previous person's post rather than starting a new topic.

Dreams, Sleep and brain studies

The scientific literature on dreams and sleep have been kept fairly separate in the past, as two bodies of literature. The sleep literature has it's theories and studies as does the dreams literature. Only recently have the two been put together in a new model of sleep and dreaming which also measures brain activity during the period of dreaming. Why is it important to now amalgamate the two bodies of research and how can this be helpful to the growing science of dreaming?

Why we study dreams and dreaming.

Dreams have been a fascination in the literature and popular culture since the beginning of time. Though we all dream and may not remember our dreams, research has shown that dreaming plays a very important function. One fact is that dreams are connected to the waking day life of the dreamer, which is known as the continuity hypothesis. Have you had dreams that reflect your own waking life is some way and if so, was this important to you in your waking life?