| dc.description.abstract | Dreams can be associated with different levels of consciousness or awareness. In extreme cases such as lucid dreaming, the dreamer can think logically, voluntarily control the dream’s narrative, and even retrieve memories of events experienced before (Voss et al., 2013). The degree of awareness of this difference between the dream context and reality is a continuous spectrum known as “dream lucidity.” Recent functional neuroimaging studies showed that the activation of the anterior prefrontal cortex (PFC), a region critical for executive function, was greater in lucid REM sleep than non-lucid REM sleep (Dresler et al., 2012). In addition, dream lucidity is related to the discrimination between self-generated precepts in a dream and externally derived experiences when awake, a capacity resembles “reality monitoring” in which executive function is also involved. Thus, we hypothesized that cognitive functions are indispensable in dream lucidity. However, whether and how cognitive functions correlate with dream lucidity remains unclear. The current thesis employed behavioral and event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments to identify the components of cognitive functions related to dreaming lucidity and determine how dream lucidity correlates with reality monitoring performance.
The first experiment was carried out to examine the correlation between dream lucidity and cognitive functions revealed by the attentional network task, the task-switching task, the majority function task, and the operational span task. Results showed that dream lucidity positively correlated with the performance of conflict resolution in the attentional network task for participants with positive alerting scores. The second experiment examined the correlation between dream lucidity and reality monitoring performance in behavioral and EEG recording aspects. Results showed that participants with high dream lucidity have a greater reality monitoring performance, especially in the source judgment of perceived items. The third experiment further examined whether and how the participant with high dream lucidity differentiated different sources of items based on memory characteristics compared to participants with low dream lucidity. Results showed that people with high dream lucidity tended to report a smaller difference between the sensory features of their memories of perceived and imagined events. These findings suggest that the greater a person’s dream lucidity, the more efficiently he or she can resolve incongruent conditions and differentiate the memory sources because their memories of imagined and actual events correspond to a smaller difference in sensory features.
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