Journal of Sleep Research
February 9, 2025
Lampros Perogamvros, Vincent Rochas, Jean‐Baptiste Beau et al.
5 citations
Dreams may help regulate emotions by reducing negative feelings. A new concept, the cathartic dream, is defined as a dream with a dynamic plot and emotional twists where negative emotions are expressed and ultimately decreased, reflecting psychological relief akin to Aristotelian catharsis. Using a large language model to categorize dream diaries, researchers detected cathartic dreams in both healthy individuals and patients with nightmares. Their prevalence increased during two weeks of imagery rehearsal therapy and targeted memory reactivation during REM sleep. The increase in cathartic dreams correlated with decreased depression scores in nightmare patients, suggesting a functional role in well-being.
May 17, 2023
David R. Samson, Alice Clerget, Noor H. Abbas et al.
2 citations
preprint
Dreams in two small-scale forager groups, the BaYaka and Hadza, contain more threat-related content than dreams in Global North populations, yet the Hadza show low negative emotions in their dreams, suggesting emotion regulation through linking threats with non-fearful contexts. The BaYaka display more community-oriented dream content. In contrast, a Global North Nightmare Disorder group shows increased negative emotion content, and a Canadian student sample during COVID-19 shows the highest anxiety dream content. The findings support the idea that dreams in non-clinical populations can reduce anxiety and negative emotions via emotional release, contributing to understanding the evolutionary function of dreaming.
Scientific Reports
October 2, 2023
David R. Samson, Alice Clerget, Noor H. Abbas et al.
Dreams in two small-scale foraging societies—the BaYaka of the Republic of Congo and the Hadza of Tanzania—show patterns that support an emotion regulation function, contrasting with dreams in Global North populations. Analyzing 896 dreams from 234 individuals, the BaYaka had more community-oriented content, while both foraging groups showed heightened threat dream content. Yet the Hadza displayed low negative emotions in their dreams, suggesting a link between potential threats and non-fearful contexts that reduces anxiety. In comparison, a Global North Nightmare Disorder group had increased negative emotion content, and a Canadian student sample during the COVID-19 pandemic showed the highest anxiety dream content. These findings support the idea that dreams can effectively regulate emotions through catharsis, contributing to understanding the evolutionary significance of dreaming.
Cerebral cortex communications
January 1, 2022
Maëva Moyne, Guillaume Legendre, Luc Arnal et al.
The brain's ability to detect emotional signals persists during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. Using electroencephalography, neural responses to emotional voices differed from neutral voices both while awake and during NREM sleep. Emotional voices also triggered more EEG arousals (sleep perturbations) than neutral or control stimuli. The amplitude of sleep event-related potentials and the number of arousals after emotional voices increased linearly with how often participants recalled their dreams. Similar correlations with dream recall frequency appeared for beta and sigma brain oscillations, but not for theta. No such correlations were found for neutral or control stimuli. These findings suggest that emotion-specific neural reactivity during sleep, rather than general alertness, may contribute to encoding or retrieving dreams.
iScience
December 25, 2020
Anjali Tarun, Danyal Wainstein Andriano, Virginie Sterpenich et al.
During non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, the brain's large-scale functional networks show a surprising pattern: nearly all networks are most active during NREM stage 2, then abruptly lose activity in NREM stage 3. However, despite this high activity in stage 2, the functional connections and mutual dependencies between networks progressively break down as sleep deepens. This means that even though networks attempt to communicate during stage 2, the efficiency of information transfer is low. The findings advance neural models of sleep and consciousness by showing that network integrity, not just activity levels, is crucial for conscious awareness.