Victor Spoormaker is a Dutch researcher and author of books on the topic of sleep and dreams. He works at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich (Germany) and is the founder of several websites created to provide scientific information about insomnia, nightmares, and other sleep problems. At the moment, these portals are supported by his colleague.
Spoormaker studied clinical psychology at the Utrecht University, where he received his doctorate in 2005 for a dissertation on the topic of nightmares. The scientist experimentally investigates how sleep disorders affect emotional memory. For this purpose, he uses electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study brain activity during sleep.
Spoormaker has also investigated the possibility of treating nightmares with the help of lucid dreams (LD). His 2006 study on the subject published in the journal Psychother Psychosom involved 23 participants, all suffering from nightmares. The findings showed that LD is an effective treatment, although what exactly accounts for the positive effect (lucidity, power over the situation, etc.) remains unclear.
Over the past year, Spoormaker has published a number of articles on the topics of depression, nightmares, and various physical reactions. The scientist has studied intermediate states between sleep phases, the behavior of people with anxiety disorders in virtual reality, as well as the reactions of patients with various psychological diseases. Among other things, Spoormaker has investigated the relationship between depression and pupil size.
The scientist’s works are available on ResearchGate.
