Nightmares are highly dysphoric dreams that are well-remembered upon awakening. Frequent nightmares have been associated with psychopathology and emotional dysregulation, yet their neural mechanisms remain largely unknown. Our neurocognitive model posits that nightmares reflect dysfunction in a limbic-prefrontal circuit comprising medial prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, hippocampus,...
Study objectives: Growing evidence suggests that nightmares have considerable adverse effects on waking behavior, possibly by increasing post-sleep negative emotions. Dysphoric reactions to nightmares are one component of nightmare severity for which the neural correlates are unknown. Here, we investigate possible neural correlates of nightmare severity in a sample of individuals who frequently...
Increasing evidence supports the clinical view that alexithymia is associated with disturbed dreaming. However, a consistent, replicable pattern of relationships between alexithymia and different dreaming components has not yet been identified. Groups of sleep-disordered outpatients (N 580; 46.0 13.2 years) and nonclinical controls (N 145; 22.9 4.2 years) were administered the Toronto...
Investigations of dream mentation in brain damaged patients have shed some light on the controversial issue of cerebral lateralization of dreaming. To examine further the relationships between brain function and dreaming, we studied REM sleep dream recall and content in four patients having undergone right functional or anatomical hemispherectomy and eight matched control subjects. Patients...
Laboratory and home dream recall was studied in four subjects with agenesis of the corpus callosum and in four control subjects who were matched for age, gender, and handedness. In addition, the structural and emotional content of home dreams was compared for these two groups. Results indicate that acallosal subjects recalled fewer dreams in the laboratory than did control subjects, but...
Polygraphic sleep recordings were made and dream reports collected over 3 consecutive nights for 12 asthmatic subjects with nocturnal attacks and 12 matched normal control subjects. The asthmatic group 1) had more episodes of a vivid impression of dreaming without recollection of dream content ("white dreams") after awakening spontaneously in the morning (nights 1 and 2) and after awakening...