Distressing Life Events, Attentional Vigilance and Flexibility, and Sublime Feeling during Impactful Dreams

An interdisciplinary review of research on impactful dreams reconsiders the tripartite division between nightmares, existential dreams, and transcendent dreams. This review facilitates articulation of two hierarchies of aesthetic-epistemic modes of oneiric metacognition: (a) a hierarchy of metaphoric relations and (b) a hierarchy of narrative relations. Apex modes of metaphoric relations are involved in the extended, unfolding, and "living" interplay of categories that constitute sublime disquietude (in existential dreams), and apex modes of narrative relations are involved in the extended, unfolding, and "living" interplay of temporal perspectives that constitute sublime enthrallment (in transcendent dreams). Recent evidence clarifies how the processes that provide cardiac vagal regulation of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) differentiate the vigilant re-experiencing of nightmares from the flexible reminiscences of existential and transcendent dreams.