In the psychology subfield of oneirology, a lucid dream is a type of dream in which the dreamer realizes that they are dreaming while dreaming. The capacity to have lucid dreams is a trainable cognitive skill. During a lucid dream, the dreamer may gain some amount of volitional control over the dream characters, narrative, or environment, although this control of dream content is not the salient feature of lucid dreaming. An important distinction is that lucid dreaming is a distinct type of dream from other types of dreams such as prelucid dreams and vivid dreams, although prelucid dreams are a precursor to lucid dreams, and lucid dreams are often accompanied with enhanced dream vividness. Lucid dreams are also distinct state from other lucid boundary sleep states such as lucid hypnagogia or lucid hypnopompia.
A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Humans spend about two hours dreaming per night, and each dream lasts around 5 to 20 minutes, although the dreamer may perceive the dream as being much longer than this.
Nicholas Keynes Humphrey is an English neuropsychologist based in Cambridge, known for his work on evolution of primate intelligence and consciousness. He studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda; he was the first to demonstrate the existence of "blindsight" after brain damage in monkeys; he proposed the theory of the "social function of intellect". He is the only scientist to have edited the literary journal Granta.
Sal Restivo is a sociologist/anthropologist.
Robert Louis Moore was an American Jungian analyst and consultant in private practice in Chicago, Illinois. He was the Distinguished Service Professor of Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Spirituality at the Chicago Theological Seminary; a training analyst at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago; and director of research for the Institute for the Science of Psychoanalysis. Author and editor of numerous books in psychology and spirituality, he lectured internationally on his formulation of a Neo-Jungian paradigm for psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. He was working on Structural Psychoanalysis and Integrative Psychotherapy: A Neo-Jungian Paradigm at the time of his death.
Shaun Gallagher is an American philosopher known for his work on embodied cognition, social cognition, agency and the philosophy of psychopathology. Since 2011 he has held the Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis and was awarded the Anneliese Maier Research Award by the Humboldt Foundation (2012–2018). Since 2014 he has been Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong in Australia. He has held visiting positions at Keble College, Oxford; Humboldt University, Berlin; Ruhr Universität, Bochum; Husserl Archives, ENS (Paris); École Normale Supérieure, Lyon; University of Copenhagen; and the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge University. He is also known for his philosophical notes on the effects of solitary confinement.
Paul Bloom is a Canadian American psychologist. He is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University and Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on language, morality, religion, fiction, and art.
Kristen Renwick Monroe is an American political scientist, specializing in political psychology and ethics. Her work on altruism and moral choice is presented in a trilogy of award-winning books in which Monroe argues that our sense of self in relation to others sets and delineates the range of choice options we find available, not just morally but cognitively.
Patricia Goldman-Rakic was an American professor of neuroscience, neurology, psychiatry and psychology at Yale University School of Medicine. She pioneered multidisciplinary research of the prefrontal cortex and working memory.
Alison Gopnik is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the areas of cognitive and language development, specializing in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning. Her writing on psychology and cognitive science has appeared in Science, Scientific American, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, Slate and others. Her body of work also includes four books and over 100 journal articles.
Joseph Carroll is a scholar in the field of literature and evolution. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley and is now Curators’ Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.
Evan Thompson is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He writes about cognitive science, phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Buddhist philosophy in dialogue with Western philosophy of mind and cognitive science.
Antti Revonsuo is a Finnish cognitive neuroscientist, psychologist, and philosopher of mind. His work seeks to understand consciousness as a biological phenomenon. He is one of a small number of philosophers running their own laboratories.
Wesley J. Wildman is a contemporary Australian-American philosopher, theologian, and ethicist. Currently, he is a full professor at the Boston University School of Theology, founding member of the faculty of Computing and Data Sciences, and convener of the Religion and Science doctoral program in Boston University's Graduate School. He is executive director of The Center for Mind and Culture, founding co-director of the Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion, and founding co-editor of the journal Religion, Brain & Behavior. Wildman's academic work has focused on interpreting religion and building theories of religious beliefs, behaviours, and experiences that acknowledge value in longstanding traditions while attempting to remain intellectually viable in light of the biological, cognitive, evolutionary, physical, and social sciences. He is an important figure in the religion and science field, along with scholars such as Robert John Russell, Nancey Murphy, and John Polkinghorne.
David Francis Germano is an American Tibetologist and professor of Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia (UVA), where he has dual appointments in its School of Nursing and Department of Religious Studies. Germano is a former board member of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, and currently serves as Editor-in-Chief for The Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies (JIATS), a journal of Tibetology.
Patrick McNamara is an American neuroscientist. His work has centered on three major topics: sleep and dreams, religion, and mind/brain.
Joseph A. Bulbulia is a Professor of Psychology in the Faculty of Science at Victoria University of Wellington (2020-present). He was the Maclaurin Goodfellow Chair in the School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts at University of Auckland (2018-2020). He previously served as a Professor in the School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. Bulbulia is regarded as one of the founders of the contemporary evolutionary religious studies. He is a past president of the International Association for the Cognitive Science of Religion and is currently co-editor of Religion, Brain & Behavior. Bulbulia is one of four on the Senior Management Team of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, a national longitudinal study started in 2009 that has repeatedly sampled over 45,000 New Zealanders. He is an associate investigator for Pulotu, a database of 116 Pacific cultures purpose-built to investigate the evolutionary dynamics of religion. In 2016 Bulbulia won a Research Excellence Award at Victoria University.
Allan Combs is an American psychologist and parapsychologist who attempts to combine his ideas of consciousness and systems theory.
Anne Marie Albano is a clinical psychologist known for her clinical work and research on psychosocial treatments for anxiety and mood disorders, and the impact of these disorders on the developing youth. She is the CUCARD professor of medical psychology in psychiatry at Columbia University, the founding director of the Columbia University Clinic for Anxiety and Related Disorders (CUCARD), and the clinical site director at CUCARD of the New York Presbyterian Hospital's Youth Anxiety Center.
Rev. Jeremy Taylor, DMin, was an American dream worker, author and Unitarian Universalist minister. He was a co-founder and past president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams.
