Qeios • Jose Luis Garcia Vigil
Time appears to slow down during meditation and dreaming compared to objective clock time, based on introspective self-observation by the author. The work uses the phenomenological approach of perception to explore subjective and objective time, comparing personal experience with clock measurements. The findings highlight the complex and interconnected nature of time perception in human consciousness.
Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews • August 1, 2026 • Clarita Bonamino, Clara Hausen, Matthew D Sacchet
Consciousness can persist, transform, and dissolve across wakefulness, sleep, and advanced meditation. An interdisciplinary perspective reveals converging phenomena that challenge binary accounts of consciousness and highlight its graded, dynamic, and trainable nature. The interface of advanced meditation, sleep, and consciousness science constitutes a promising frontier for understanding the structure, dynamics, and limits of conscious experience. Advanced meditation offers cultivable means for modulating these dimensions, while sleep provides recurring biological states in which awareness, experiential content, embodiment, and sensory input coupling systematically dissociate. Evidence from these domains highlights states such as deep absorption meditation, cessations, lucid dreaming, sleep-wake transitions, and clear light sleep that challenge binary distinctions between consciousness and unconsciousness. An integrated, mixed-methods perspective enables a more nuanced examination of graded and minimal forms of conscious experience.
Biological Cybernetics • July 13, 2026 • Hassan Ugail, Newton Howard
A new composite index that combines three properties of brain activity—scale-free temporal organization, cross-frequency organization, and metastable flexibility in large-scale synchronization—separates conscious from non-conscious synthetic brain states without overlap and distinguishes wakefulness from N2 and REM sleep in 30 healthy adults using two-channel EEG recordings. The index captures organized dynamical complexity rather than raw signal complexity alone and remains stable across sensitivity and Monte Carlo analyses. The framework is not tied to any single theory of consciousness and may be applicable to anesthesia, disorders of consciousness, and basic consciousness research.
International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research • July 6, 2026 • Charles E Peck
Dream weaving among the Blaan and T'boli peoples of Mindanao, Philippines, is a tradition in which t'nalak textile designs are believed to be bestowed by divine spirits in dreams, forming a social-moral and spiritual consciousness that provides identity and social cohesion. This cultural analysis compares Filipino concepts such as Kapwa (shared identity) and Loob (relational will) to Western sociological theories including Geertz's ideology as a cultural system, Durkheim's collective consciousness, and the sociology of knowledge and power. The paper also draws parallels with Native American dream frameworks, where dreams are a source of divine inspiration, and advocates for social consciousness as an approach to religion, contrasting "way of life" with the "supernatural."
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) • June 30, 2026 • Dr. Juan Carlos Rey
Mediumistic experiences—reports of communicating with spirits, ancestors, or other nonordinary beings—are vivid, culturally powerful, and ontologically disputed. This review proposes the Principle of Explanatory Sequence: investigate such contested experiences by moving from careful description through phenomenological, cultural, psychological, biological, and historical analyses before making ontological claims. A companion principle, Explanatory Conservation, holds that later explanations should not erase earlier phenomenological evidence. Drawing on predictive processing, embodied cognition, neuroanthropology, and other fields, the review argues mediumistic experience emerges from interactions among neurobiology, culture, ritual, personal history, and interpretation. It does not prove or disprove spirits but clarifies what different forms of evidence can and cannot support, concluding that these experiences expose the limits of explanation itself.
Frontiers in Sleep • June 24, 2026 • Adam Haar Horowitz, Karen Konkoly, Michelle Carr et al.
A pilot study tested whether targeted dream incubation (TDI) at sleep onset can direct dream content into subsequent REM sleep. Eleven participants received verbal prompts about a tree and were awakened serially at sleep onset, then during a daytime nap. All 11 successfully incubated the target theme at sleep onset. Of the eight who entered REM sleep, four (50%) incorporated the tree into their first REM dream, and five (63%) did so in later REM dreams. Results suggest TDI may influence REM dream content, offering a method to explore how dream generation and function may be continuous or differ across sleep stages.
Quality in Sport • June 20, 2026 • Arkadiusz Adam Psiuk
Motor learning in sports benefits from both physical practice and sleep-dependent memory consolidation. Waking motor imagery engages brain networks similar to actual movement, while slow-wave sleep and REM sleep support procedural memory through neural replay. Lucid dreaming—awareness during sleep—may allow mental rehearsal that partially reactivates prefrontal regions and shows physiological correlates of dreamed movement. Preliminary evidence suggests lucid dream practice can improve waking performance comparably to waking mental practice. It offers a low-physical-load tool for rehabilitation, tapering, and pre-competition stress management, though low lucid dream frequency, variable induction reliability, and few controlled trials in elite athletes call for cautious use.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) • June 15, 2026 • Ramin Bidari
Human beings experience a wide range of thoughts, emotions, memories, and social roles and can become aware of them, raising the question of what is aware of these processes. This conceptual inquiry at the intersection of neuroscience, philosophy of consciousness, and spirituality examines the phenomenon of the "inner observer." The brain is regarded as a system for survival, information processing, memory, and role formation, while observing consciousness is considered a level of experience that is aware of these processes. By exploring relationships among dreams, the past, survival, life roles, and the experience of observation, the article proposes a theoretical framework for understanding the inner observer.
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research • June 12, 2026 • Sabine Rabourdin, Damien Roy, Claude Berghmans
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are phenomena where consciousness seems separate from the physical body, reported for centuries in spiritual traditions and now studied in neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology. This literature review presents scientific research and explanatory approaches to OBEs, which typically occur during altered states like sleep, meditation, hypnosis, psychotropic substance use, lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, or intense stress. Common descriptions include floating sensations, panoramic vision, altered body perception, and feeling of free movement. Despite advances, OBEs remain difficult to study rigorously, with no consensus on their origin and ununified results across disciplines. The discussion calls for a more precise classification grid and suggests advanced methodologies could provide new insights.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) • June 11, 2026 • Dieter Walter Liedtke
Consciousness arises gradually when a system recursively aligns new information with stored memory, self/non-self distinction, evaluation, and future positioning, rather than being an all-or-nothing property. The model proposes three levels—functional consciousness (e.g., immune systems, cells), self-model consciousness (e.g., animals, humans), and phenomenal consciousness (subjective experience)—and introduces a Recursive Alignment Index (RAI) to measure this process on a scale from 0 to 5. Falsifiable hypotheses include that systems with recursive memory matching adapt better, and that non-neuronal biological systems can show low RAI values. The framework links neuroscience, AI research, and information physics without claiming human-like consciousness in atoms or machines.