Sleep Medicine
July 2, 2026
Emilie Gagneron, Katayoun Rezaei, Romain Perot et al.
Suicide is a major public health concern, and identifying early indicators of suicidal crisis remains a key clinical challenge. Nightmares have been suggested as potential early markers of suicide risk. This study aimed to investigate dream alterations preceding a suicidal crisis in patients presenting to a psychiatric emergency department. This prospective study was conducted in a psychiatric...
Sleep Medicine
April 1, 2026
Su Min Kim, Tae-Gon Noh, J. Byun et al.
STUDY OBJECTIVES Isolated rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) involves dream enactment behaviors (DEBs) during REM sleep, accompanied by REM sleep without atonia (RWA). While most DEBs are bed-confined, a minority engage in ambulatory behaviors. This study investigated clinical, behavioral, and physiological characteristics of iRBD patients exhibiting ambulatory behaviors....
Sleep Medicine
April 1, 2026
Zulkayda Mamat, Rumia B Owaisi, Sarif Alrai et al.
This systematic scoping review (ScR) and mixed-methods systematic review (MMSR) investigates dreams of the deceased (DoD), i.e., experiences where individuals dream of deceased loved ones. We examined prevalence, characteristics of dreamers and the deceased, functions of these dreams, and cultural interpretations. A comprehensive search across five academic databases resulted in 4030 reports...
Sleep Medicine
June 24, 2025
Fan Feng, Hui Guo, Grace A Ding et al.
2 citations
Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS), cataplexy, sleep paralysis, and hallucinations, and is often associated with other psychological and physiological disturbances. These symptoms lead to decreased social functioning and lower quality of life for individuals with narcolepsy. While current pharmacological treatment for narcolepsy can be effective...
Sleep Medicine
June 1, 2025
George Kapotsis, Paschalis Steiropoulos, Nikoletta Rovina et al.
The ancient Greeks gave a special importance to sleep, both because of the interpretation of dreams and because of its healing properties. Therapeutic incubation [enkoimesis] was a ritual practice, resorted at the healing sanctuaries of antiquity in Greece, such as those of Asclepius [Asclepieia] and was the culmination of a process of sleeping in a sacred space in order to receive an...
Sleep Medicine
December 1, 2024
Ahmed Ali Khan, Ammara Abid, Maheen Nawaz et al.
Sleep paralysis (SP) is a rapid eye movement (REM) parasomnia that occurs during the transition between wakefulness and sleep. During this brief state, a person is conscious but unable to move or speak, often experiencing hallucinations. It is 'isolated' when it occurs without other symptoms of narcolepsy or sleep disorders. Despite its prevalence, much remains unknown about its clinical...
Sleep Medicine
October 1, 2024
Costanza Colombo, Nicola Cellini
Sleep paralysis (SP) is a REM-related parasomnia, characterized by the inability to perform voluntary movements. It is a relatively widespread phenomenon in the general population and, although usually not dangerous, it is experienced with intense fear. The current study aims to evaluate the lifetime prevalence and characteristics of SP in the Italian student population. The study was conducted...
Sleep Medicine
July 1, 2024
Andreas S Lappas, Eleni Glarou, Zoi A Polyzopoulou et al.
13 citations
Sleep disturbances are an important symptom dimension of post-traumatic-stress-disorder (PTSD). There is no meta-analytic evidence examining the effects of all types of pharmacotherapy on sleep outcomes among patients with PTSD. Medline/Embase/PsychInfo/CENTRAL/clinicaltrials.gov/ICTRP, reference lists of published reviews and all included studies were searched for Randomised Controlled Trials...
Sleep Medicine
August 1, 2023
David A Kalmbach, Philip Cheng, Anthony N Reffi et al.
15 citations
Cognitive-behavioral therapy is effective for prenatal insomnia, but unresolved cognitive arousal limits patient outcomes. Therapies aimed at reducing cognitive arousal may benefit pregnant women with insomnia. This proof-of-concept trial evaluated Perinatal Understanding of Mindful Awareness for Sleep (PUMAS, which combines mindfulness with behavioral sleep strategies) on insomnia, depression,...
Sleep Medicine
April 1, 2023
Betul Rauf, Brian A Sharpless, Dan Denis et al.
Isolated sleep paralysis is a benign but frightening condition characterised by a temporary inability to move at sleep onset or upon awakening. Despite the prevalence of this condition, little is known concerning its clinical features, associated demographic characteristics, and prevention as well as disruption strategies. An online cross-sectional study was conducted. The sample comprised 3523...
Sleep Medicine
March 1, 2023
Z. Wang, Kai Zhang, Long He et al.
BACKGROUND Nightmares are common in patients with psychiatric disorders. Patients with psychiatric disorders often experience depressive symptoms. Nightmares have been associated with depressive symptoms among adolescents. Previous studies have explored the mediating role of nightmare distress in the relationship between frequent nightmares and depressive symptoms in the general adolescent...
Sleep Medicine
October 1, 2022
Maurice Ohayon, Amir Pakpour
Sleep paralysis is a common phenomenon which causes and consequences are seldomly studied. The aim of this study was to investigate the incidence and prevalence of sleep paralysis (SP) in the American adult population and its evolution on a 3-year period. This longitudinal study was conducted between 2002 and 2015 and included a representative sample of the US general population. A total of...
Sleep Medicine
April 1, 2022
Simone Cavallotti, Hans-Christian Stein, Mariantonietta Savarese et al.
Although aggressive dream content is considered a distinctive feature of REM Sleep Behavior Disorder (RBD) and patients often report violent dreams during medical interviews, nonviolent behaviors (eating, drinking, urinating) and pleasant actions (e.g laughing, singing, dancing) or simply elemental, jerky limb movements are frequently observed during video-polysomnography. As a first-line...
Sleep Medicine
December 1, 2021
Michael Raduga
5 citations
Lucid dreams (LDs) occur when people become aware that they are dreaming. This phenomenon has a wide range of possible applications from the perspectives of psychology, training physical movements, and controlling computers while asleep, among others. However, research on LDs might lack efficiency because the standard LD verification protocol uses polysomnography (PSG), which requires an...
Sleep Medicine
September 1, 2021
Carolina Aguirre, Marcelo Miranda, Ambra Stefani
Several classical writers had an impressive power of observation and often depicted medical conditions in their works long before medical literature did. Sleep paralysis is a common and frightening experience, in particular when occurring for the first time. Therefore, it is not surprising that it has been frequently described in the classical literature, eg by Dostoevsky, Kafka, Dickens, and...
Sleep Medicine
November 1, 2020
Gwen Van der Wijk, Borbála Blaskovich, Yeganeh Farahzadi et al.
Frequent nightmares show signs of hyperarousal in NREM sleep. Nevertheless, idiopathic nightmare disorder is considered a REM parasomnia, but the pathophysiology of REM sleep in relation to frequent nightmares is controversial. Cortical oscillatory activity in REM sleep is largely modulated by phasic and tonic REM periods and seems to be linked to different functions and dysfunctions of REM...
Sleep Medicine
June 1, 2019
Brian A Sharpless, Monika Kliková
OBJECTIVE Isolated sleep paralysis (ISP) is a relatively common parasomnia often accompanied by fear and distress. However, little is known about the range and relative severities of typical ISP symptoms and accompanying hallucinations. Furthermore, there have been inconsistent findings with regard to demographic differences in ISP. PATIENTS/METHOD In sum, 185 individuals with ISP (and 322...
Sleep Medicine
April 1, 2019
Tore Nielsen, Michelle Carr, Claudia Picard-Deland et al.
OBJECTIVE Childhood adversity figures prominently in the clinical histories of children and adolescents suffering from a panoply of physical, mental or sleep disorders, including posttraumatic stress disorder. But the nature and prevalence of early adversity in the case of idiopathic nightmare-prone individuals have received little study. We characterize the types and frequencies of...
Sleep Medicine
October 1, 2018
Claudia Picard-Deland, Michelle Carr, Tyna Paquette et al.
Idiopathic nightmares are a common disturbance of rapid eye movement sleep (REM) sleep, but studies of comorbid pathologies and sleep architecture suggest that non-REM (NREM) sleep is also affected. Sleep spindles are a NREM sleep characteristic associated with both pathophysiology and sleep-dependent memory consolidation, yet they have not been evaluated in frequent nightmare recallers. The...
Sleep Medicine
September 1, 2018
Barbara E Jones
A great pioneer in sleep research, Michel Jouvet applied rigorous scientific methods to the study of sleep-wake states and associated changes in consciousness which, with his vivid imagination and creative mind, he unveiled as the mysteries of sleep and waking such as to inspire a generation of researchers in the field. His initial discovery of a third state distinguished from waking (W) and...
Sleep Medicine
July 1, 2018
Satomi Okabe, Kazuhiko Fukuda, Hiroko Mochizuki-Kawai et al.
As connections between nightmares and various psychiatric disorders have been reported, the clinical significance of studying dream emotionality is now growing in importance. Because the olfactory bulb connects directly to the amygdala odor presentation may be a crucial tool to study dream emotions. Previous studies have demonstrated that presentation of positive/negative odors during rapid eye...
Sleep Medicine
April 1, 2016
Alexandra D Pérusse, Joseph De Koninck, Maude Pedneault-Drolet et al.
The dream activity of patients with primary insomnia (PI) has rarely been studied, especially using in-laboratory dream collection, although dreams could be linked to their state of hyperarousal and their negative waking experiences. The objective of the study was to compare patients with PI and good sleeper controls (GSCs) in terms of dream recall frequency and dream content. Polysomnography...
Sleep Medicine
June 1, 2014
Jessica Lara-Carrasco, Valérie Simard, Kadia Saint-Onge et al.
The majority of women develop sleep impairments during pregnancy, but alterations in dream experiences remain poorly understood. This study aimed to assess prospectively and comparatively the recall of dreaming and of disturbed dreaming in late pregnancy. Fifty-seven nulliparous, third-trimester pregnant women (mean age±SD, 28.7±4.06 years) and 59 non-pregnant controls (mean age±SD, 26.8±4.21...