Psychology

Dreams

I have been interested in the scientific and statistical study of dreams for a long time, with a particular interest in the intersection of sensation & perception with sleep & dreams.  Recently, I published an article in the International Journal of Dream Research, looking at taste experiences in dreams, linked below.  If you're interested in dreams, scientifically or casually, I've linked several resources and tips in the drop-down menus below that I've personally found helpful.

Publications

Haley, L. (2023). Analysis of Taste in Dreams: A Defined and Large-Scale Investigation of Dreamt Gustatory Experiences. International Journal of Dream Research, 16(2), 125–134.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.11588/ijodr.2023.2.90419

Dream Resources

DreamBank.net (https://www.dreambank.net/) - a reliable corpus of over 30,000 dream reports hosted by the University of California Santa Cruz and maintained by G. William Domhoff and Adam Schneider.  An excellent tool for both amateur dream enthusiasts and serious researchers.  Both the "dream search: frames version" and "random sample" tools on the right hand side are good places to start.

DreamResearch.net (https://dreams.ucsc.edu/) - a related website, in which Domhoff and Schneider compile numerous articles related to dreaming and the quantitative study of dream content.

Sleep and Dream Database (https://sleepanddreamdatabase.org/) - another dream corpus, which I personally find difficult to use and navigate around, and which lacks the powerful regex search functions of DreamBank, but which is notable for its historical dreams, such as those of the incredible Lucrecia de León (16th century).

IJoDR (https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/IJoDR/issue/archive) - the International Journal of Dream Research is a freely accessible and online peer-reviewed journal of dream research from around the world.  They have lots of interesting articles to read from over the years.

REGEX - for more intricate dream research, you may want to learn how to search massive text corpuses for particular words and phrases, which is very easily done with regex (regular expressions).  This cheat sheet (https://www.rexegg.com/regex-quickstart.html) gives a perfect overview of the syntax, and this tool (https://regexr.com/) lets you easily test and troubleshoot any regex syntax you're working on.  Even if you know nothing about computer programming, regex is totally understandable with practice.

National Sleep Foundation (https://www.thensf.org/) - the NSF doesn't have the most sophisticated website, but it's a good place to start learning about sleep and dreams if you're new to the topic.

Dream Tips

If you'd like to better remember your dreams, I have a few suggestions that I've found to be successful over the years.  There are many great resources online and in print, though do be vigilant, as there's an unfortunate amount of sleep and dream misinformation out there, as well. 

This may sound obvious, but the very act of telling yourself repeatedly throughout the day and before bed that you will remember your dream in the morning may positively impact your recollection.  Consciously reinforcing a clear goal can help it become a reality. 

This is perhaps the single best thing you can do to improve your dream recollection.  As with the first tip, the very act of keeping a journal will subconsciously reinforce your desire to remember your dreams.  Since the subconscious is what you're concerned with, this is the right level of approach.  You can journal in whatever way you want—pen or pencil, print or electronic, rigorous or informal, decorated or spartan—but the best thing you can do is aim for consistency.  Any recording is better than no recording, but the more you write down your dreams, the better you will tend to remember them in the future.  You'll also have the added benefit of being able to compare all your past dreams.  From personal experience, being able to look my dreams across the past eight years is a beautiful insight.  I would highly suggest giving each dream a unique and identifying name, and recording the date it happened (the morning of, since that's when you're recording it and that's also most likely when the dream took place).   

Lastly, I highly suggest writing in first person present tense, as if it's currently happening, as this will help you recollect the narrative of the dream as you go through it in your head upon waking.  Don't be discouraged if you can't remember pieces of the dream, or if by remembering some parts you forget other parts.  This is natural, and improvement takes time.  Even the smallest detail, like an overarching color or feeling, can become important later. 

Not getting enough sleep can seriously impact your ability to remember your dreams (not to mention virtually every other aspect of your daily life).  If you struggle to get enough sleep, the National Sleep Foundation website (linked above) is a place to start.  There are many helpful resources online dedicated to this. 

When you wake up, try to remain as still as you can, not moving from the position you find yourself in.  The less moving around you do, the more easily you may remember your dream.  I've found that even after a whole day, if I lie down in the same way that I dreamed my last dream, I might remember bits of it even if I didn't that morning.  (Encoding-retrieval coordination is very important to memory).  I would also suggest getting an alarm clock that beeps at you instead of playing music.  Music alarm clocks may be more pleasant to wake to, but that slow awakening immediately sucks your attention away from your dream and toward the music (part of the psychological appeal of music for humans is its attentional landscape shifting abilities).  Any distractions will negatively impact your recollection.  It also helps to consistently wake up at the same time of morning. 

The more you can learn about sleep and dreams, the better.  Remembering your dreams is a skill, and like any skill it can be practiced.  Like any skill, it will also take a long time to master, and it's easy to get discouraged at an activity you might feel you have no control over.  A consistent effort is the best thing you can give, but it's okay to take time off from trying to always remember your dreams.  Sometimes relaxing like this is for the best.  Your dreams will always be there for you when you get back.

Cognition

At Binghamton University I worked for two years in the Learning and Representation in Cognition Laboratory, exploring strategies to enhance creative problem solving.  Work in this area is still ongoing, but in the meantime you can check out the rest of the LaRC Lab's great work here:

https://kurtzlab.binghamton.edu/