Main interests: dreaming, lucid dreams, dream engineering, sleep-dependent memory consolidation, memory reactivations, episodic memory sources of dreams, REM sleep, false awakenings, psychophysiology of nightmares, paradoxical insomnia, social aspects of sleeping and dreaming
Methods: dream collection and analysis, targeted memory reactivation, virtual reality, text mining, force plate, EEG, polysomnography, sleep spindles
Review paper : Trends in Cognitive Sciences
VR and flying dreams
Inducing flying dreams with a pre-sleep VR flight stimulation ; Understanding the virtual simulation of dreaming and how this may contribute to VR development
Collaboration with media artist Katerine Dennie-Marcoux
Targeted memory reactivation and dreams
Mechanistic and temporal relationships between dreams and memory reactivations during sleep; The role of kinesthetic dreaming in skill learning; Development of sleep-based methods to optimize complex skill learning.
Neurobiology of Learning and Memory
Pandemic dreams
Investigating changes in dream, bad dream and nightmare recall; identifying the most prevalent dream themes and their relationships with symptoms of stress, depression and anxiety during the first COVID-19 lockdown. Data from online surveys and tweets.
Collaboration with Elizaveta Solomonova, PhD.
Psychophysiology of idiopathic nightmares
Investigating changes in sleep spindles in frequent nightmare recallers and their relationship with pathology scores; Relationships between the lifelong occurrence of nightmares and disruptions in the normal development of spindle generation processes.
Memory sources of dreams
Overnight serial awakenings to investigate which episodic memories are incorporated in dreams, and how and when they are reactivated during the night; Temporal orientation of dreams; Large database study to investigate the phenomenon of dreaming about the sleep lab.
Vestibular system and lucid dreams
Replication of previous findings showing that frequent lucid dreamers have better balance than non-lucid dreamers using a sensitive force plate; Relationships between balance and dreamed gravity imagery; Vestibular contribution to bodily self-awareness in wake and in sleep.