Journal of Sleep Research
October 1, 2025
Maïlis Charpentier-Hélary, Aurélien De la Chapelle, Maxime Linard et al.
Epilepsy impacts cognition during wakefulness. As epileptic activity is present and even augmented during sleep, epilepsy could also influence sleep-related cognitive processes. However, whether epilepsy modulates sleep-related experiences like dreaming remains poorly known. Here, we prospectively investigated the characteristics and determinants of dreaming in patients with epilepsy....
Journal of Sleep Research
October 1, 2022
Salomé Blain, Aurélien De la Chapelle, Anne Caclin et al.
Several factors influencing dream recall frequency (DRF) have been identified, but some remain poorly understood. One way to study DRF is to compare cognitive processes in low and high dream recallers (LR and HR). According to the arousal-retrieval model, long-term memory encoding of a dream requires wakefulness while its multisensory short-term memory is still alive. Previous studies showed...
Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)
August 22, 2022
Perrine Ruby, Rémy Masson, Benoit Chatard et al.
Event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with the involuntary orientation of (bottom-up) attention toward an unexpected sound are of larger amplitude in high dream recallers (HR) than in low dream recallers (LR) during passive listening, suggesting different attentional functioning. We measured bottom-up and top-down attentional performance and their cerebral correlates in 18 HR (11 women,...
Nature and Science of Sleep
2022
Raphael Vallat, Başak Türker, Alain Nicolas et al.
Several results suggest that the frequency of dream recall is positively correlated with personality traits such as creativity and openness to experience. In addition, neuroimaging results have evidenced different neurophysiological profiles in high dream recallers (HR) and low dream recallers (LR) during both sleep and wakefulness, specifically within regions of the default mode network (DMN)....
Journal of Sleep Research
August 18, 2021
Kathryn Kennedy, Célyne Bastien, Perrine Ruby et al.
25 citations
Nightmares are often associated with psychiatric disorders and acute stress. This study explores how the COVID-19 pandemic may have influenced the content of nightmares. A sample of N = 419 US adults completed online surveys about sleep and COVID-19 experiences. Participants were asked about the degree to which they agreed with statements linking greater general stress, worse overall sleep and...
Sleep
May 3, 2021
Chloe Wills, Kathryn Kennedy, Célyne Bastien et al.
Abstract Introduction During the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals have faced unprecedented events, which are often stressful. Stress has an important impact on dreams, and stress-induced sleep difficulties may also impact dream recall. The present study evaluated associations between sleep, stress and dream content on dream recall during the pandemic. Methods A sample of N=419 US adults completed...
Sleep
December 14, 2020
Raphael Vallat, Alain Nicolas, Perrine Ruby
Why do some individuals recall dreams every day while others hardly ever recall one? We hypothesized that sleep inertia-the transient period following awakening associated with brain and cognitive alterations-could be a key mechanism to explain interindividual differences in dream recall at awakening. To test this hypothesis, we measured the brain functional connectivity (combined...
Frontiers in Neurology
2020
Benjamin Putois, Wendy Leslie, Claire Asfeld et al.
In order to ensure robust relationships between the dependent and independent variables in clinical dream/nightmare studies, the major factors which influence the frequency of reported dreams must be controlled. This article sets out methodological recommendations to both researchers seeking to ensure the equivalence of experimental groups of participants in group-matching designs, and to...
Frontiers in Neurology
2020
Alain Nicolas, Perrine Ruby
Over the past 60 years, the impact of psychotropic drugs on dream recall and content has been scarcely explored. A review of the few existing experimental results on the topic leads us to the following conclusions. For antidepressant drugs, in the great majority, they reduce dream recall frequency (DRF), and the improvement of depressive symptoms is associated with an increase of positive...
Scientific Reports
October 30, 2019
Jane Plailly, Manon Villalba, Raphael Vallat et al.
42 citations
Abstract The question of a possible link between dream content and memory consolidation remains open. After a comprehensive review of the literature, we present novel findings from an experiment testing whether the incorporation of recently learned stimuli into dream reports is associated with improved post-sleep memory performance. Thirty-two high dream recallers freely explored new...
Psychology of Consciousness
2019
M. Blagrove, Christopher Edwards, E. van Rijn et al.
Throughout history there have been reports and claims that consideration of dreams can produce personal realizations and insight. We assessed Exploration-Insight scores associated with discussing Rapid Eye Movement (REM) and non-REM (NREM) dreams in connection with recent waking life experiences. Thirty-one participants were cued in the sleep laboratory for a daydream report and then awakened...
Journal of Sleep Research
October 1, 2018
Raphael Vallat, Mickael Eskinazi, Alain Nicolas et al.
There is a lack of up-to-date data on sleep and dream habits of college students. To fill in this gap, we used an online questionnaire sent to the student mailing lists of two major universities of Lyon (Lyon 1 and Lyon 2) for the recruitment of an functional magnetic resonance imaging study with sleep disorders as exclusion criteria. In the sample (1,137 French college students, 411 males,...
Consciousness and Cognition
February 1, 2018
Elaine Van Rijn, Alexander M Reid, Christopher L Edwards et al.
This study investigates the time course of incorporation of waking life experiences into daydreams. Thirty-one participants kept a diary for 10 days, reporting major daily activities (MDAs), personally significant events (PSEs) and major concerns (MCs). They were then cued for daydream, Rapid Eye Movement (REM) and N2 dream reports in the sleep laboratory. There was a higher incorporation into...
Frontiers in Psychology
2018
Raphael Vallat, Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub, Alain Nicolas et al.
Recent findings indicate that dream recall frequency (DRF) is associated with neurophysiological traits, and notably the regional cerebral blood flow at rest within the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). To test whether, such physiological traits are rooted in anatomical specificities, we used voxel-based morphometry to compare the white matter and gray...
PLoS One
October 11, 2017
Raphael Vallat, Benoit Chatard, Mark Blagrove et al.
60 citations
Several studies have demonstrated that dream content is related to the waking life of the dreamer. However, the characteristics of the memory sources incorporated into dreams are still unclear. We designed a new protocol to investigate remote memories and memories of trivial experiences, both relatively unexplored in dream content until now. Upon awakening, for 7 days, participants identified...
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
2017
Raphael Vallat, Tarek Lajnef, Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub et al.
High dream recallers (HR) show a larger brain reactivity to auditory stimuli during wakefulness and sleep as compared to low dream recallers (LR) and also more intra-sleep wakefulness (ISW), but no other modification of the sleep macrostructure. To further understand the possible causal link between brain responses, ISW and dream recall, we investigated the sleep microstructure of HR and LR,...
Frontiers in Psychology
2015
Christopher L Edwards, Josie E Malinowski, Shauna L McGee et al.
There have been reports and claims in the psychotherapeutic literature that the consideration of recent dreams can result in personal realizations and insight. There is theoretical support for these claims from work on rapid eye movement (REM) sleep having a function of the consolidation of emotional memories and the creative formation of connections between new and older memories. To...
Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology
June 1, 2014
Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub, Alain Nicolas, Jérôme Daltrozzo et al.
Dreaming is still poorly understood. Notably, its cerebral underpinning remains unclear. Neuropsychological studies have shown that lesions in the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and/or the white matter of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) lead to the global cessation of dream reports, suggesting that these regions of the default mode network have key roles in the dreaming process (forebrain...
Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)
May 1, 2014
Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub, Olivier Bertrand, Dominique Morlet et al.
The neurophysiological correlates of dreaming remain unclear. According to the "arousal-retrieval" model, dream encoding depends on intrasleep wakefulness. Consistent with this model, subjects with high and low dream recall frequency (DRF) report differences in intrasleep awakenings. This suggests a possible neurophysiological trait difference between the 2 groups. To test this hypothesis, we...
Frontiers in Psychology
2013
Christopher L Edwards, Perrine Ruby, Josie E Malinowski et al.
This paper addresses claims that dreams can be a source of personal insight. Whereas there has been anecdotal backing for such claims, there is now tangential support from findings of the facilitative effect of sleep on cognitive insight, and of REM sleep in particular on emotional memory consolidation. Furthermore, the presence in dreams of metaphorical representations of waking life indicates...
Frontiers in Psychology
2013
Perrine Ruby, Camille Blochet, Jean-Baptiste Eichenlaub et al.
Studies in cognitive psychology showed that personality (openness to experience, thin boundaries, absorption), creativity, nocturnal awakenings, and attitude toward dreams are significantly related to dream recall frequency (DRF). These results suggest the possibility of neurophysiological trait differences between subjects with high and low DRF. To test this hypothesis we compared sleep...
Frontiers in Psychology
2011
Perrine Ruby
63 citations
Dreaming is still a mystery of human cognition, although it has been studied experimentally for more than a century. Experimental psychology first investigated dream content and frequency. The neuroscientific approach to dreaming arose at the end of the 1950s and soon proposed a physiological substrate of dreaming: rapid eye movement sleep. Fifty years later, this hypothesis was challenged...
Arna Ghosh, Arthur Dehgan, Tarek Lajnef et al.
Dreams and our ability to recall them are among the most puzzling questions in sleep research. Specifically, putative differences in brain network dynamics between individuals with high versus low dream recall rates, are still poorly understood. In this study, we addressed this question as a classification problem where we applied deep convolutional networks (CNN) to sleep EEG recordings to...