Cell Reports
April 7, 2026
Nicolas Decat, Arthur Le Coz, Jade Sénéchal et al.
A popular view holds that mental experiences uniquely differ between wakefulness and sleep, yet recent work suggests continuity across these stages. Here, we address this question by examining the wake-sleep transition, a window marked by rapid shifts in wake/sleep stages and mental experiences. We recorded electroencephalography (EEG) activity in 92 participants during two daytime resting...
PLoS Computational Biology
February 1, 2026
Tao Xia, Chuan-Peng Hu, Başak Türker et al.
Sleep has traditionally been conceptualized as a state of cognitive disconnection, yet emerging evidence indicates that decision-making capacities persist across sleep stages. Here, we elucidate the computational mechanisms underlying real-time lexical decision-making during polysomnographically-verified sleep, using facial electromyography and hierarchical drift diffusion modeling in both...
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
September 30, 2025
Karen R Konkoly, Saba Al-Youssef, Christopher Y Mazurek et al.
3 citations
Neuroscientific investigations of human dreaming have been hampered by reliance on dream recall after awakening. For example, a challenge of associating EEG features with post-waking dream reports is that they are subject to distortion, forgetting, and poor temporal precision. In this study, we used real-time reporting to investigate whether one of the most robust features of the waking visual...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
September 1, 2025
Jean-Baptiste Maranci, Pierre Champetier, Delphine Oudiette et al.
preprint
Abstract Sleep helps regulate emotions, but it is still unclear whether -and how- the emotions we experience in dreams contribute to this regulation. To uncover the potential function of dream emotions, we must first understand what they are and how they unfold in dreams. The emotional content of dreams has mostly been studied using post-sleep dream reports, which provide a biased and static...
Nature Communications
August 13, 2025
William Wong, Rubén Herzog, Kátia Cristine Andrade et al.
10 citations
Magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) studies of dreaming are an essential paradigm in the investigation of neurocognitive processes of human consciousness during sleep, but they are limited by the number of observations that can be collected per study. Dream research also involves substantial methodological and conceptual variability, which poses problems for the integration of results. To...
Sleep
February 10, 2025
Yannis Idir, Régis Lopez, Amélie Barbier et al.
5 citations
Disorders of arousal (DoA) are diagnosed on the basis of clinical criteria, including inappropriate or absent responsiveness to communication attempts. Surprisingly, the ability of patients to interact with others during DoA episodes has not been systematically investigated. To address this gap, we conducted three studies. First, we used a retrospective questionnaire to assess verbal...
Trends in Neurosciences
April 1, 2024
Célia Lacaux, Mélanie Strauss, Tristan A Bekinschtein et al.
Sleep is crucial for many vital functions and has been extensively studied. By contrast, the sleep-onset period (SOP), often portrayed as a mere prelude to sleep, has been largely overlooked and remains poorly characterized. Recent findings, however, have reignited interest in this transitional period and have shed light on its neural mechanisms, cognitive dynamics, and clinical implications....
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
December 1, 2023
Thomas Andrillon, Delphine Oudiette
44 citations
Wakefulness, non-rapid eye-movement (NREM) and rapid eye-movement (REM) sleep differ from each other along three dimensions: behavioral, phenomenological, physiological. Although these dimensions often fluctuate in step, they can also dissociate. The current paradigm that views sleep as made of global NREM and REM states fail to account for these dissociations. This conundrum can be dissolved...
May 16, 2023
William Wong, Kátia C. Andrade, Thomas Andrillon et al.
21 citations
preprint
Magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) studies of dreaming are an essential paradigm in the investigation of neurocognitive processes of human consciousness during sleep, but they are limited by the number of observations that can be collected per study. Dream research also involves substantial methodological and conceptual variability, which poses problems for the integration of results. To...
Current biology : CB
April 12, 2021
Karen R Konkoly, Kristoffer Appel, Emma Chabani et al.
126 citations
Dreams take us to a different reality, a hallucinatory world that feels as real as any waking experience. These often-bizarre episodes are emblematic of human sleep but have yet to be adequately explained. Retrospective dream reports are subject to distortion and forgetting, presenting a fundamental challenge for neuroscientific studies of dreaming. Here we show that individuals who are asleep...
Brain : a journal of neurology
July 1, 2019
Célia Lacaux, Charlotte Izabelle, Giulio Santantonio et al.
47 citations
Some studies suggest a link between creativity and rapid eye movement sleep. Narcolepsy is characterized by falling asleep directly into rapid eye movement sleep, states of dissociated wakefulness and rapid eye movement sleep (cataplexy, hypnagogic hallucinations, sleep paralysis, rapid eye movement sleep behaviour disorder and lucid dreaming) and a high dream recall frequency. Lucid dreaming...
Scientific Reports
February 8, 2018
Delphine Oudiette, Pauline Dodet, Nahema Ledard et al.
Breathing is irregular during rapid eye-movement (REM) sleep, whereas it is stable during non-REM sleep. Why this is so remains a mystery. We propose that irregular breathing has a cortical origin and reflects the mental content of dreams, which often accompany REM sleep. We tested 21 patients with narcolepsy who had the exceptional ability to lucid dream in REM sleep, a condition in which one...
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2012
Delphine Oudiette, Marie-José Dealberto, Ginevra Uguccioni et al.
To test whether mental activities collected from non-REM sleep are influenced by REM sleep, we suppressed REM sleep using clomipramine 50mg (an antidepressant) or placebo in the evening, in a double blind cross-over design, in 11 healthy young men. Subjects were awakened every hour and asked about their mental activity. The marked (81%, range 39-98%) REM-sleep suppression induced by...
Brain : a journal of neurology
June 1, 2010
Laurène Leclair-Visonneau, Delphine Oudiette, Bertrand Gaymard et al.
Rapid eye movements and complex visual dreams are salient features of human rapid eye movement sleep. However, it remains to be elucidated whether the eyes scan dream images, despite studies that have retrospectively compared the direction of rapid eye movements to the dream recall recorded after having awakened the sleeper. We used the model of rapid eye movement sleep behaviour disorder (when...