Structural differences between non-lucid, lucid dreams and out-of-body experience reports assessed by graph analysis

FRANCISCO T. GALLO; IGNACIO SPIOUSAS; ANTONELA TOMMASEL; NEREA L. GUERRERO; LUIS I. BRUSCO; DANIELA GODOY; CECILIA FORCATO; PABLO M. GLEISER

Buenos Aires

Congreso; XXXVII Reunión Anual SAN 2022; 2022

Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias

predict ratings of dream complexity, with more connectedness and less randomness beingseen as dream report complexity increases. This approach proved to be useful todifferentiate dream reports in the pathological population as well as NREM and REM dreamreports. During lucid dreaming (LD), subjects know they are dreaming and can control thedream 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 andOBEs are evident, some authors claim OBEs are a kind of LDs. In this work, we analyzedream reports that include non-lucid, lucid dreams and out-of-body experiences initiatedfrom sleep paralysis. We collected a set of 1014 dream reports (824 non-LDs, 122 LDs and68 OBEs) obtained from 60 participants that kept a dream journal for two months. Thecollected reports were transformed into directed graphs, where each different word plays therole of a node, and consecutive words are connected by a directed, unweighted edge. Weanalyze different network measures to compare the graphs. Overall, we found that lematizedOBE reports are significantly different from lucid and non-lucid dream reports on indirectmeasures of connectivity and recursion, allowing for a categorization of different dreamexperiences.