Right hemispheric mediation of dream visualization: a case study.
Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior December 1, 1981 N H Kerr, D Foulkes
A male patient with extensive damage to the right hemisphere, causing blindness in the left half of his visual field, was studied over two nights in a sleep lab. Dream reports were collected after six awakenings from REM sleep. His dreams were typically sequential and narrative but lacked continuous visual imagery; any visual images were fragmentary and static. He also could not perform waking tasks requiring mental representation of space. These observations suggest that dream narratives may arise from different brain sources than the visual content of dreams, and that visual dream experiences may depend on right-hemisphere processing. Differences from a prior study may be due to different interview techniques.