Narcolepsy is a chronic sleep disorder characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness, cataplexy, hypnagogic hallucinations, and sleep paralysis. This disease affects significantly the overall patient functioning, interfering with social, work, and affective life. Some symptoms of narcolepsy depend on emotional stimuli; for instance, cataplectic attacks can be triggered by emotional inputs such...
CortexDecember 25, 2018Yvonne Blake, David Terburg, Ross Balchin et al.
Neuroimaging studies have repeatedly shown amygdala activity during sleep (REM and NREM). Consequently, various theorists propose central roles for the amygdala in dreaming - particularly in the generation of dream affects, which seem to play a major role in dream plots. However, a causal role for the amygdala in dream phenomena has never been demonstrated. The traditional first step in...
Background/purpose: Dream emotions and contents are associated with psychological well-being. Dream disturbances, such as frequent nightmares and dream anxiety, are associated with a variety of psychopathological conditions. Therefore, it is important to consider nightmares and the resulting dream anxiety. To address this issue, the Van Dream Anxiety Scale (VDAS) was designed especially for...
As virtual reality designers, we aim to create technological experiences to better human connection and well-being in hopes of helping humankind and society in a positive way. It is therefore important to ground the frameworks we use in genuine human experience rather than mindlessly apply models that do not account for highly personal and profound experiences. One type of experience that could...
Humans typically lack awareness that they are dreaming while dreaming. However, at times a remarkable exception occurs and reflective consciousness can be regained while dreaming, referred to as lucid dreaming. While most individuals experience lucid dreams rarely there is substantial variance in lucid dream frequency. The neurobiological basis of lucid dreaming is unknown, but evidence points...
Nightmares are a comparatively frequent phenomenon. They are often accompanied by emotional distress and gain clinical relevance when recurrent. To assess how much distress nightmares cause the individual, the Nightmare Distress Questionnaire (NDQ, Belicki, 1992) is probably the most often used measure. However, its validity is still disputed. To analyze the validity of the proposed three NDQ...
Nightmares are a common sleep disorder, defined as highly disturbing mentation which usually awakens the individual from rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. While nightmares are mainly a REM sleep phenomenon, Picard-Deland et al., (2017) recently showed an association between nightmare recall and sleep spindles, which are a non-rapid eye movement (NREM) oscillatory feature. Their results pointed to...
This qualitative study of patients’ dreams in analytical psychotherapy using the method of Structural Dream Analysis investigated 15 cases and 202 dreams. In total, 5 major dream patterns were identified and that accounted for the majority of the dreams. The clients’ dream series were dominated by 1 or 2 repetitive patterns, which were closely connected to the psychological problems of the...
This article reports the findings of a new exercise in the “blind analysis” of a long dream series. The study focused on 940 dreams of a woman (“Beverly”) who kept a regular dream journal for 30 years. Four subsets of her dreams (from 1986, 1996, 2006, and 2016) were analyzed using a digital word search template, and then predictions were made about Beverly’s waking life based on the word usage...
Abstract Nightmares are a hallmark symptom of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), affecting an estimated 90% of trauma-exposed adults. This article reports on a pragmatic randomized control trial to evaluate the effectiveness of an enhanced treatment approach called Planned Dream Interventions (PDI) compared with a standard sleep hygiene intervention. Ninety-two U.K. Armed Forces veterans...
Nightmares are considered the hallmark of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although the characteristics of these distressing dreams may vary with the type of traumatic event, the pathophysiology exposes central dysfunction of brain structures at the level of the hippocampus, amygdala, and locus coeruleus, modulated by neurochemical imbalance in nor-adrenergic, dopaminergic, and serotonin...
Study objectives: Understanding nightmares (NM) and disturbing dreams (DD) in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been limited by the unpredictability of these events and their nonappearance in the sleep laboratory. This study used intensive, longitudinal, ambulatory methods to predict morning reports of NM/DD in veterans in whom chronic, severe PTSD was diagnosed. Methods: Participants...
Dreams and psychosis share several important features regarding symptoms and underlying neurobiology, which is helpful in constructing a testable model of, for example, schizophrenia and delirium. The purpose of the present communication is to discuss two major concepts in dreaming and psychosis that have received much attention in the recent literature: insight and dissociation. Both phenomena...
Although the dream narrative, of (bio)logical necessity, originates with the dreamer, s/he typically does not know this. For the dreamer, the dream world is the real world. In this article I argue that this nightly misattribution is best explained in terms of the concept of mental ownership (e.g., Albahari, 2006; Klein, 2015a; Lane, 2012). Specifically, the exogenous nature of the dream...
Dreaming is a very creative state of mind. Lucid dreamers – who can become aware in their dreams that they are dreaming – have an advantage of directly tapping into the creative potentials of the dreaming mind. This study explored the relationship between lucid dreaming and creativity. Twenty lucid dreamers were asked to accomplish a creative generation task once in a lucid dream and once while...
A variety of induction techniques have been proposed to increase lucid dream frequency. An online survey was performed asking about knowledge of lucid dreaming and lucid dream induction techniques. The initial sample size was N=1380 with a subsample of N=716 who were asked questions concerning lucid dream induction techniques. The findings indicate that one quarter of all participants had heard...
Post-traumatic nightmares (PTN) are a common and enduring problem for individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other clinical presentations. PTN cause significant distress, are associated with large costs, and are an independent risk factor for suicide. Pharmacological and non-pharmacological treatment options for PTN exist. A previous review in this journal demonstrated that...
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...
Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Clinical and Research NewsFull AccessSleep Specialists Assess Treatments for Nightmares in AdultsLynne LambergLynne LambergPublished Online:21 Sep 2018https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2018.8b24AbstractAn American Academy of Sleep Medicine panel evaluates behavioral, psychological, and pharmacologic options for treating nightmares in...
Nightmares occur more frequently in patients with schizophrenia than they do in the general population. Nightmares are profoundly distressing and may exacerbate daytime psychotic symptoms and undermine day-to-day function. Clinicians do not often ask about nightmares in the context of psychotic illness and patients may underreport them or, if nightmares are reported, they may be disregarded; it...