The Dreaming Brain/Mind: A Role in Understanding Complex Mental Disorders?
Armando D'Agostino, Ivan Limosani, Silvio Scarone
Frontiers in Psychiatry January 31, 2012 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyt.2012.00003 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Dreaming |
| Key points | Argues that dreaming and psychotic experiences share phenomenological features and neurobiological patterns, and proposes that comparing dream phenomenology with waking psychotic mentation could help clarify the relationship between circadian timing disruption and neuropathology. Notes that this mechanistic relationship remains unclear. |
Abstract
Abnormalities in the sleep/wake cycle and within sleep itself have extensively been studied in a broad range of psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. Despite increasing evidence for a mechanistic overlap between the disruptions of circadian timing control and neuropathology, the relationship remains unclear (Wulff et al., 2010). One possible way to address this problem from a psychiatric perspective is to compare the phenomenological correlate of sleep with the waking mentation observed in patients. Indeed, so-called “positive” symptoms such as abnormal senso-perceptual experiences or thought processes ranging from ideas of reference to highly structured delusions, share substantial similarities with dream phenomenology. The same process by which psychotic patients progress from salience attributed to irrelevant stimuli to a new, highly relevant meaning, appears to occur in dreams, where a single hallucinatory image can convey “an immediate emotionally compelling meaning that is not related to the image in any obvious way” (Feinberg, 2011). With the exception of the rare experience of lucidity, the dreamer has no recognition of his objective status, i.e., being asleep and vastly detached from the external environment; dream images produced uniquely by endogenous neural activity are interpreted as coming from the external world; heightened and often incongruous emotions are coupled with a decrease in ego functions which ultimately leads to instinctual behaviors and severe impairment in reality testing (Hobson, 2009). The striking similarity between these aspects of dreaming and psychosis has been observed by most of the funding pioneers of the modern approach to psychopathology. Indeed, it is largely unknown that Emil Kraepelin extensively studied his own dreams with the aim of progressing his understanding of schizophrenic thought disorder (Engels et al., 2003). Recent advances in neuroscience have led few contemporary researchers to bind these complex phenomena, with electrophysiological, neurochemical, and cerebrofunctional data now pointing to shared patterns across dreaming and psychotic experiences (Hobson, 2004; Gottesmann, 2006).
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on dreaming, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dreaming: a conceptual framework for philosophy of mind and empirical research | 2016 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Metaphor and hyperassociativity: the imagination mechanisms behind emotion assimilation in sleep and dreaming | 2015 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Varieties of Lucid Dreaming Experience | 2000 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Experimental Research on Dreaming: State of the Art and Neuropsychoanalytic Perspectives | 2011 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| The Neurobiology of Consciousness: Lucid Dreaming Wakes Up | 2009 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
Citations in the library
Cited by 5
- Childhood sleep disturbance and risk of psychotic experiences at 18: UK birth cohort The British Journal of Psychiatry May 8, 2015
- Sleep, Nightmares and Schizophrenia Journal of Sleep Disorders and Management November 3, 2017
- Arousal in Nocturnal Consciousness: How Dream- and Sleep-Experiences May Inform Us of Poor Sleep Quality, Stress, and Psychopathology. Frontiers in Psychology May 10, 2017
- Stability of cognition across wakefulness and dreams in psychotic major depression. Psychiatry Research January 30, 2014
- Such stuff as psychoses are made on? Behavioral and Brain Sciences December 2013
Cites 13
- Lucid Dreaming: a State of Consciousness with Features of Both Waking and Non-Lucid Dreaming Sleep September 1, 2009
- From drugs to deprivation: a Bayesian framework for understanding models of psychosis Psychopharmacology May 27, 2009
- Corollary Discharge, Hallucinations, and Dreaming Schizophrenia Bulletin October 7, 2010
- Dream research in schizophrenia: methodological issues and a dimensional approach. Consciousness and Cognition December 1, 2011
- Dreamed movement elicits activation in the sensorimotor cortex. Current Biology November 8, 2011
and 8 more in the library