The ability to process recently acquired knowledge is clearly maintained during sleep. Here we assess whether and how far the sleeper controls this processing (in a non-volitional and non-conscious manner). We posit that during sleep, the cognitive concerns of previous waking may guide access to, and processing of, items of declarative knowledge with which those concerns are associated. In a...
Four dream reports, collected from each of 16 subjects in an experimental night, were analysed using the criteria of Mandler and Johnson's story grammar. The experimental night was the first of the four nights where subjects had spontaneously given a dream report after each of the four awakenings planned in REM sleep. A multivariate analysis of covariance, taking the order of the nights where...
This study aimed to ascertain a) whether morning reports of dream experience more frequently reproduce bizarre contents of night reports than nonbizarre ones and b) whether this effect depends on the rarity of bizarre contents in the dream or on their richer encoding in memory. Ten subjects were awakened in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep three times per night for 4 nonconsecutive nights and...
Dream reports of patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) were analyzed to ascertain whether cognitive deficits associated with this nonfocal brain pathology influence dream structure or dream recall. Fifteen outpatients with idiopathic PD were sampled (diagnosed from 1 to 10 years and currently in stage II or III of Hoehn and Yarh's scale); all were without psychiatric symptoms or major medical...