Imperfect Cognitions

In today's blog post, Mark Blagrove and Julia Lockheart present The Science and Art of Dreaming (Routledge 2023). Mark Blagrove is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Sleep Laboratory at Swansea University. Julia Lockheart is Associate Professor at Swansea College of Art, University of Wales Trinity Saint David. They undertake public discussions and painting of dreams in the DreamsID.com science art collaboration.   Julia Lockheart Mark had become interested in investigating the memory sources of dreams through discussing individual dreams at length with the dreamer: this utilised the free association method of Sigmund Freud in which the putative mechanisms of dream formation during the night are followed back in reverse through free associations to the dream when awake.  This interest had resulted in studies that investigated gains of personal insight to the individual through the open-ended group discussion of dreams and their relationship to the recent waking l...

Adam Powell is a junior research fellow in theology and religion at Durham University and a core member of the ' Hearing the Voice ' project, an interdisciplinary investigation of voice-hearing (auditory verbal hallucinations) funded by the Wellcome Trust. He is the author of Irenaeus, Joseph Smith, and God-Making Heresy ; Hans Mol and the Sociology of Religion and numerous essays on 19th-century religious experience. Did you have a dream last night? How do you know? Was it vivid or dull? Was it real? Was it really a dream? If it was not a dream, what was it? For those who experience hypnagogic (between waking and sleeping) or hypnopompic (between sleeping and waking) hallucinations, the sense perceptions they experience in the middle of the night seem quite real. They report vivid images, felt presences, diffuse light, out-of-body experiences, and extreme emotional states like euphoria or dread. What is more, studies of prevalence estimate that 39% to 85% of the gen...

In this post, I interview Louise Moody , Associate Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York, and Tom Stoneham , Professor of Philosophy & Dean of the Graduate Research School, also at the University of York. Tom and Louise are presently researching dreaming: specifically, they are investigating an alternative model of dreaming (one that holds dreams are confabulations on waking rather than experiences of some type that are remembered and reported as dreams) and whether this model might be beneficial for those experiencing parasomnias. SS: Why is the topic of dreaming of interest to philosophers and what contributions have philosophers made so far? LM & TS: The first thing to say is that dreaming takes up a surprisingly large amount of our mental lives with most of us apparently dreaming 4-6 times a night – indeed, awakenings from all sleep-phases (i.e. both r.e.m and non-r.e.m sleep) elicit dream reports between 50-90% of the time (e.g. Dement & Kle...