Walking dreams in congenital and acquired paraplegia.
Marie-Thérèse Saurat, Maité Agbakou, Patricia Attigui, Jean‐louis Golmard, Isabelle Arnulf
Consciousness and Cognition December 2011 DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2011.05.015 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Observational study Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Sample size | 30 |
| Population | 15 paraplegic patients (including 5 with congenital paraplegia) and 15 healthy control subjects |
| Duration | 6 weeks of dream reports |
| Key findings | People with paraplegia, including those who never walked, reported voluntary leg movements such as walking, running, and dancing in their dreams, with walking dreams in 38.2% of patients versus 28.7% of controls and no correlation with paralysis duration. The authors propose that a cerebral walking program, possibly genetic but more likely formed via mirror neurons, is reactivated during sleep. |
Abstract
To test if dreams contain remote or never-experienced motor skills, we collected during 6 weeks dream reports from 15 paraplegics and 15 healthy subjects. In 9/10 subjects with spinal cord injury and in 5/5 with congenital paraplegia, voluntary leg movements were reported during dream, including feelings of walking (46%), running (8.6%), dancing (8%), standing up (6.3%), bicycling (6.3%), and practicing sports (skiing, playing basketball, swimming). Paraplegia patients experienced walking dreams (38.2%) just as often as controls (28.7%). There was no correlation between the frequency of walking dreams and the duration of paraplegia. In contrast, patients were rarely paraplegic in dreams. Subjects who had never walked or stopped walking 4-64 years prior to this study still experience walking in their dreams, suggesting that a cerebral walking program, either genetic or more probably developed via mirror neurons (activated when observing others performing an action) is reactivated during sleep.
Citations in the library
Cited by 13
- Experimental Research on Dreaming: State of the Art and Neuropsychoanalytic Perspectives Frontiers in Psychology 2011
- Characteristics of the memory sources of dreams: A new version of the content-matching paradigm to take mundane and remote memories into account PLoS One October 11, 2017
- Increased Reward-Related Behaviors during Sleep and Wakefulness in Sleepwalking and Idiopathic Nightmares PLoS One August 19, 2015
- Examining the association between depersonalisation traits and the bodily self in waking and dreaming. Scientific Reports March 13, 2024
- Body representation in dreams of congenital and early-life amputees Scientific Reports March 22, 2025
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Cites 8
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- Practicing a Motor Task in a Lucid Dream Enhances Subsequent Performance: A Pilot Study The Sport Psychologist June 1, 2010
- Waking and dreaming: related but structurally independent. Dream reports of congenitally paraplegic and deaf-mute persons. Consciousness and Cognition December 13, 2010
- Cognitive replay of visuomotor learning at sleep onset: temporal dynamics and relationship to task performance. Sleep 2010
- Spoken and written dream communication: differences and methodological aspects. Consciousness and Cognition February 19, 2008
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