People with Wilson's disease who also have rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (RBD) report more nightmares and dreams with violent or aggressive content than those without RBD, and their dream reports contain more negative emotions and aggression. Patients with Wilson's disease overall have shorter dream reports than healthy controls, which may reflect cognitive deficits. The lack of major differences in dream content between Wilson's disease patients and controls might be due to successful treatment. Violent, aggressive dream content appears characteristic of RBD in Wilson's disease as in other populations.
More than 70% of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) recall their dreams, but their dream recall rate is lower than that of healthy controls. Dream recall is not influenced by neuropsychological deficits or seizure frequency. Compared to controls, TLE patients report dreams with a higher percentage of familiar settings and fewer dreams involving success. These findings suggest that mesial and neocortical temporal structures play a role in dream experience, and that selective activation of dysfunctional mesial structures may contribute to variability in dream recall. Dream content changes may also reflect social and psychological comorbidities of epilepsy.
On average, women tend to recall their dreams more often than men, but EEG studies on women's dreams are scarce. In 20 healthy young Portuguese women without psychiatric disorders, REM dream recall and content were analyzed over two nights using video-polysomnography. Compared to normative U.S. female college student data, the Portuguese women's dreams more frequently involved family, dead and imaginary characters, and had higher rates of failure and striving. These differences likely reflect cultural influences.
Dreams reflect waking-life experiences, including personal concerns and cultural environment. Comparing written dream reports from Brazilian and German samples revealed both cultural differences and universal similarities. German dream reports contained more bizarreness, aggression, problems, and extreme emotions, while Brazilian reports featured more depression-related topics and work- and leisure-related themes. Similarities included verbal and physical interaction, numbers of male and female characters, and death-related themes, suggesting universal dream characteristics. The differences are interpreted as reflecting core cultural patterns: for Brazil, themes of miscegenation, emotional culture, and saudade (longing); for Germany, a conflict between high performance in science and arts and twentieth-century history.