Medical Hypotheses
July 6, 2013
Sérgio Mota‐rolim, John Fontenele Araújo
50 citations
Lucid dreaming—being aware of dreaming during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep—may be linked to increased frontal lobe activity, contrasting with psychosis, which involves reduced frontal activity and dream-like features intruding into wakefulness. The authors propose that frontal brain stimulation during REM sleep could trigger lucid dreams, offering a test of this hypothesis. They suggest lucid dreaming research could advance understanding of consciousness and its disorders, serve as therapy for recurrent nightmares in depression and PTSD, and aid physical rehabilitation through motor imagery during dreams.
PLoS ONE
July 23, 2020
Joshua M. Martin, Danyal Wainstein Andriano, Natália Bezerra Mota et al.
41 citations
Dream reports collected after rapid eye movement (REM) sleep are typically longer, more vivid, and more story-like than those from non-REM sleep, but traditional measures may be confounded by report length. By analyzing 133 dream reports from 20 participants as non-semantic directed word graphs, researchers found that REM dream reports have greater connectedness—words recur with longer range—compared to N2 sleep reports. Graph measures predicted dream complexity, with higher connectedness and lower randomness linked to more complex reports. The largest connected component improved models using report length alone for predicting sleep stage and complexity. Graph analysis offers an automated method to complement traditional dream report analysis.
Frontiers in Neuroscience
May 8, 2019
Sérgio Mota‐rolim, Achilleas Pavlou, George Nascimento et al.
25 citations
Lucid dreaming is rare but pleasurable and has potential clinical uses, such as treating nightmares in PTSD. Researchers have been developing portable devices to induce lucid dreams. These devices detect REM sleep via EEG and then deliver visual, auditory, or tactile cues to alert the dreamer without waking them, or use transcranial alternating current stimulation of the frontal cortex. This review covers 10 such devices: DreamLight, NovaDreamer, Aurora, Remee, REM-Dreamer, ZMax, Neuroon, iBand, LucidCatcher, and Aladdin.