Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Francisco T Gallo | email: frgallo@itba.edu.ar
Francisco T Gallo 1°5°, Nerea L Herrero 1°5°, Antonela Tommasel 2°, Luis I Brusco 3°, Daniela Godoy 2°, Pablo M Gleiser 4°5°, Cecilia Forcato 1°5°
1° Laboratorio de Sueño y Memoria, Departamento de Ciencias de la vida, Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA).
2° Laboratorio de Neurociencia de Sistemas Complejos, Instituto Tecnológico de Buenos Aires (ITBA).
3° ISISTAN – Instituto Superior de Ingeniería de Software Tandil (CONICET/UNCPBA), Tandil, Bs. As., Argentina
4° Centro de Neuropsiquiatría y Neurología de la Conducta- CENECON, Facultad de Ciencias Médicas, Universidad de Buenos Aires.
5° Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET)
During sleep, humans experience offline experiences that we call dreams, which lack rational judgment about their strangeness. However, during lucid dreaming (LD), subjects know they are dreaming and can control the dream content. Another type of aware dream experience is the out-of-body experience (OBE) initiated from sleep paralysis. Although the differences between non-LD, LD and OBEs are evident, some authors claim OBEs are a kind of LDs. We analyzed a set of 1014 dream reports (824 non-LDs, 122 LDs and 68 OBEs) obtained from 60 participants that kept a dream journal for two months. The collected dreams were analyzed by automatic methods of analysis of emotions such as EmoLex and Sentisense, also with classifiers such as Empath. The dream stories provided by the participants were scored with a series of ratings using a method based on Hall and Van de Castle’s dream content scoring system upon which we developed variations and additional measures to adapt to the requirements of our task. Overall, we found that OBEs have significantly more negative emotions and less positive emotions, as measured by automatic methods. OBEs against Lucid reports show significantly more physical sensations and a broad variety of them, and they also refer more to their own movements. Lucid reports have more references to themselves and to the dream environment than OBE reports. These content differences support the idea that OBEs are unique experiences and distinct from LDs.