The relationship between dream content and waking life experiences remains difficult to decipher. However, some neurobiological findings suggest that dreaming can, at least in part, be considered epiphenomenal to ongoing memory consolidation processes in sleep. Both abnormalities in sleep architecture and impairment in memory consolidation mechanisms are thought to be involved in the...
Objectives: Dreams are commonly described as violent, threatening, and aggressive in patients with REM behavior disorder (RBD), but very few studies have directly investigated dream content in this population. We systematically assessed dreams in subjects with a confirmed diagnosis of idiopathic RBD (iRBD) and explored psychological traits within the group with specific focus on aggressiveness....
Abnormalities in the sleep/wake cycle and within sleep itself have extensively been studied in a broad range of psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. Despite increasing evidence for a mechanistic overlap between the disruptions of circadian timing control and neuropathology, the relationship remains unclear (Wulff et al., 2010). One possible way to address this problem from a psychiatric...
Several independent lines of research in neurobiology seem to support the phenomenologically-grounded view of the dreaming brain/mind as a useful model for psychosis. Hallucinatory phenomena and thought disorders found in psychosis share several peculiarities with dreaming, where internally generated, vivid sensorimotor imagery along with often heightened and incongruous emotion are paired with...
Several overlapping features have frequently been described between psychosis and the subjective experience of dreaming from the neurobiological to the phenomenological level, but whether this similarity reflects the cognitive organization of schizophrenic thought or rather that of psychotic mentation independent of diagnostic categories is still unclear. In this study, 40 actively psychotic...
Periodicity, hallucinatory phenomena and lack of awareness of one’s detachment from reality seem to connect the subjective experience of dreaming to that of psychosis. Both can be considered fully conscious states of the brain/mind, with an immediate influence of non-conscious elements caused by an impaired interaction with the external world. Psychological and pharmacological induction of...
Cognitive bizarreness is a shared feature of the dream and waking mentation of acutely psychotic patients. The authors investigated this measure of the structural architecture of thought in the dream and waking mentation of 20 nonpsychotic patients with Parkinson's disease after treatment with prodopaminergic drugs. Statistically overlapping levels of cognitive bizarreness were found in the...