Trauma Nightmares and Mental Health: Realistic Dreams a Key Warning Sign
A veteran who dreams about being back in the thick of an intense battle, or a car accident victim who repeatedly wakes up from a nightmare just before what feels like a potentially fatal impact… dreams that create vivid and direct experience of someone’s most traumatic memories are clinical red flags. A new study offers
Living in the Mind’s Darkness: Understanding Aphantasia
In my work is an experiential and dream therapist, I often invite my clients to enter their dreams, allowing their nocturnal imagery to re-form in their mind’s eye. Most people I ask can do this quite easily, and some produce a virtual torrent of imagery. But not everyone can, and I used to think of
Peering Into the ‘Black Box’ of Dreaming
How Technology is Making Our Dream Worlds More Accessible and Malleable One aspect of dreams that makes them so mysterious is that they are notoriously difficult to study. While those who dream vividly or lucidly can accurately report their detailed dream content, most of us imperfectly capture fragments of our dreams and are left with
Why We Forget Our Dreams: A New Perspective
One of the most enduring paradoxes in the field of dream research is the mystery of dream amnesia. Why do we forget most of our dreams, even though they’re often vivid, emotionally charged, and potentially important for our survival? A recent paper by Zhao and colleagues offers an elegant solution to this puzzle. Here’s the
Influencing Dream Content and Creativity
Fascinating new research that confirms what creative minds like Salvador Dalí and Thomas Edison intuited long ago – the drowsy period as we drift off to sleep can supercharge our creative abilities. Researchers from MIT and Harvard (Horowitz et al., 2020, 2023) demonstrated that deliberately influencing dreams during sleep onset (known as N1 sleep or
I was recently asked this question by Women’s Health magazine, and it led to some interesting further reading and provocative thoughts. An amazing half of people asked will say they had a precognitive dream at some point in their lives. Does this mean dreams can predict the future? So far, there is no scientific evidence
Psychedelic Medicine and Dreams: A conversation with Katherine Lawson
The use of psychedelic substances as therapeutic agents is a trend with great promise, and a work in progress. There is an exciting but nascent body of research on efficacy and best practices, and there remains many legal and ethical obstacles. In the meantime, the use of plant medicines is growing like a weed –
Become An Exquisite Listening Partner with Focusing
Are you interested in deepening your ability to listen in a way that enables another person to touch into their body’s wisdom? Whether you are a mental health professional, partner, coach, parent, friend (or all of these!), focusing is a gift you can bring to every relationship – including your connection with your own self.
Are Nightmares Bad for Your Heart?
John’s nightmares visit often, and when they wake him up, he can feel his heart racing and his palms sweating. He has been putting off therapy to address the trauma he knows is fueling his nightmares because it’s just so hard face it. What he doesn’t realize is that this avoidance not only disrupts his