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Dreams

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Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

Synonyms

Apparition; Daydreams; Dreamlike thought; Fantasy; Hallucination; Image; Nightmare; Vision

Definition

Dreams are a succession of vivid images, scenes, thoughts, and emotions that occur involuntarily in the mind in sleep, which the dreamer often experiences as something that is actually happening.

Introduction

Dreams are a universal human experience and have always attracted the interest of man since ancient times. In the early twentieth century, dreams became a phenomenon worth of scientific study in Freud’s works; then, later on, since the mid-twentieth century they have become the subject of several empirical studies with sleep monitoring methodologies in sleep laboratories of North America, that gave rise to a spread of several neurobiological models based on the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep = dreams equation. The most recent developments in brain imaging techniques and the study of dreaming in patients with brain lesions have allowed the scientific community to observe...

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Correspondence to Claudio Colace .

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Colace, C. (2017). Dreams. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1376-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1376-2

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

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Chapter history

  1. Latest

    Dreams
    Published:
    10 March 2017

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1376-2

  2. Original

    Dreams
    Published:
    13 January 2017

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1376-1