Objective. Violent dream content and its acting out during rapid eye movement sleep are considered distinctive for rapid eye movement sleep behaviour disorder (RBD). This study reports first quantitative data on dreaming in a cohort of patients with treated Wilson's disease (WD) and in patients with WD with RBD. Methods. Retrospective questionnaires on different dimensions of dreaming and a...
Research that has focused on the relationship between the Big Five personality dimensions and lucid dreaming frequency has been restricted to student samples. The present study included adolescents and adults (N = 1375). i.e., the sample included a large range of ages. Lucid dreaming was more strongly related to openness to experiences compared to previous findings. The small but significant...
Connecting dreams with somatic illness has a long tradition; e. g., physicians like Hippocrates or Galen used dreams for diagnosing and curing illnesses. The present study investigated the relationship between illness, health-related worries, and health-related dreams in a sample of 178 persons. The findings indicate that having a minor illness and especially health-related worries increased...
STUDY OBJECTIVE: Nightmares are a frequent symptom in narcolepsy. Lucid dreaming, i.e., the phenomenon of becoming aware of the dreaming state during dreaming, has been demonstrated to be of therapeutic value for recurrent nightmares. Data on lucid dreaming in narcolepsy patients, however, is sparse. The aim of this study was to evaluate the frequency of recalled dreams (DF), nightmares (NF),...
Motor practice in lucid dreams is a form of mental rehearsal where the dreamer can consciously rehearse motor skills in the dream state while being physically asleep. A previous pilot study showed that practice in lucid dreams can improve subsequent performance. This study aimed to replicate those findings with a different task (finger-tapping) and compare the effectiveness of lucid dream...
BACKGROUND: Nightmares and bad dreams are common in people with emotional disturbances. For example, nightmares are a core symptom in posttraumatic stress disorder and about 50% of borderline personality disorder patients suffer from frequent nightmares. Independent of mental disorders, nightmares are often associated with sleep problems such as prolonged sleep latencies, poorer sleep quality,...
Studies investigating the prevalence of nightmares have generally found higher frequencies in studies using daily logbooks or diaries compared to retrospective reports, raising the question as to whether retrospective questionnaires lead to an underestimation of nightmare frequency, possibly due to the suppression of the frightening nightmare experience or if the diary enhances recall. In this...
Despite numerous anecdotal accounts of music dreams, empirical research in this area is scarce. The present online study (N = 2929) found a prevalence of about 6% of all dreams include some element of music. Age was negatively related to the frequency of music dreams, whereas dream recall frequency, the overall emotional tone of the dreams, and the attitude towards dreams showed positive...
The experience of post-amputation pain such as phantom limb pain (PLP) and residual limb pain (RLP), is a common consequence of limb amputation, and its presence has negative effects on a person's well-being. The continuity hypothesis of dreams suggests that the presence of such aversive experiences in the waking state should be reflected in dream content, with the recalled body representation...
In lucid dreams the dreamer is aware that he or she is dreaming. Although such dreams are not that uncommon, many aspects of lucid dream phenomenology are still unclear. An online survey was conducted to gather data about lucid dream origination, duration, active or passive participation in the dream, planned actions for lucid dreams, and other phenomenological aspects. Among the 684...
Home dream recall frequencies and nightmare frequencies show great inter-individual differences. Most of the studies trying to explain these differences, however, studied young participants, so these findings might not be true for persons older than 25 years. The present study investigated the relationship between dream recall, nightmare frequency, age, gender, sleep parameters, stress, and...
The relationship between time in dreams and real time has intrigued scientists for centuries. The question if actions in dreams take the same time as in wakefulness can be tested by using lucid dreams where the dreamer is able to mark time intervals with prearranged eye movements that can be objectively identified in EOG recordings. Previous research showed an equivalence of time for counting...
Despite positive results from the use of dreams in psychotherapy and for personal growth, research regarding the relationship between waking life and dreams of patients with mental disorders is relatively scarce. The present paper reviews the existing literature on dreams of psychiatric patients in order to identify the continuities and discontinuities between the dreams and the waking life...
There have been many studies which show that waking life is mirrored in dream content. In a previous study, the relation between time spent on sports related tasks and sport dreams has been shown where that sports students dream more often of sports than psychology students. In this study the aim was to test whether this trend is also true for students of politics and if the time spent in...
The analysis of this long dream series (N = 9133 dreams) indicates that smoking plays a role in the dreams (1.43%) of a non-smoker. Most often, other dream characters were smoking which annoyed the dreamer. The medium success rate of doing something about the smoking probably reflects a basic pattern of the dreamer dealing with annoying situations. The present study is a good starting point to...
A recent meta-analysis showed a robust gender difference in nightmare frequency of medium effect size in adolescents and young adults: Women tend to report nightmares more frequently than men. The present study, carried out in an unselected student sample, indicates that 2 factors mediate the gender difference in nightmare frequency: neuroticism and overall dream recall frequency. The effect of...
The ability to recall a dream upon waking up in the morning has been linked to a broad variety of factors such as personality, creativity, sleep behaviour and cognitive function. There have been conflicting findings as to whether dream recall is related more to the right or to the left hemisphere, and conflicting findings regarding the relationship of dream-recall frequency to handedness. We...
Background and Objectives: Nightmares are defined as disturbing mental experiences that generally occur during REM sleep and often result in awakening. Even though about 5% of the general population suffers from nightmares, little is known about seeking professional help in this patient group.
The hypothesis that dreaming is involved in off-line memory processing is difficult to test because major methodological issues have to be addressed, such as dream recall and the effect of remembered dreams on memory. It would be fruitful--in addition to studying the ancient art of memory (AAOM) in a scanner--to study the dreams of persons who use AAOM regularly.
The present study elicited a variety of coping strategies for nightmares in the general population and asked whether these coping strategies were helpful. A large-scale online survey (N=2 872, mean age: 43 years) was carried out. About 11.5% of the participants reported nightmares once a week or more often. The results indicate that sharing of nightmares was the most prevalent coping strategy,...
Lucid dream and nightmare frequencies vary greatly between individuals and to assess these differences reliable instruments are needed. The present study aimed to examine the reliability of eight-point scales for measuring lucid dream and nightmare frequencies. The scales were administered twice (with a four-week interval) to 93 sport students. A re-test reliability for the lucid dream...
The study investigated aspects of dream sharing and dream recall in an adult sample (N = 667). It explored with whom dreams are shared and why, as well as the relation between relationship intimacy and dream sharing frequency with the partner. A significant, positive correlation was found between dream sharing frequency in couples and perceived relationship intimacy. Further, the findings...
Recent studies suggest that lucid dreaming (awareness of dreaming while dreaming) might be associated with increased brain activity over frontal regions during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. By applying transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), we aimed to manipulate the activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) during REM sleep to increase dream lucidity. Nineteen...
Suppressing unwanted thoughts can lead to an increased occurrence of the suppressed thought in dreams. This is explainable by the ironic control theory, which theorizes why the suppression of thoughts might make them more persistent. The present study examined the influence of thought suppression on dream rebound, dream distress, general psychiatric symptomatology, depression, sleep quality and...
Sleep related symptoms of depression include sleep fragmentation, early morning awakening, decreased rapid eye movement (REM) sleep latency, increased REM density, and more negative dream content. Most tricyclic antidepressants (ADs) increase total sleep time and decrease wake time after sleep onset, while many selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) have an opposite effect. However,...