ABSTRACT Background: The Disturbing Dreams and Nightmares Severity Index (DDNSI) is commonly used when assessing the experience of nightmares. It comprises two parts examining i) chronicity and ii) nightmare consequences. The primary aim of the present study was to explore the dimensional structure of the optional and currently unvalidated nightmare consequences component using exploratory...
Experiences that are self-generated and independent of sensory stimulations permeate our whole life. This theme issue examines their similarities and differences, systematizes the literature from an integrative perspective, critically discusses state-of-the-art empirical findings and proposes new theoretical approaches. The aim of the theme issue is to foster interaction between the different...
Why do some individuals recall dreams every day while others hardly ever recall one? We hypothesized that sleep inertia-the transient period following awakening associated with brain and cognitive alterations-could be a key mechanism to explain interindividual differences in dream recall at awakening. To test this hypothesis, we measured the brain functional connectivity (combined...
Within the broad field of human perception lies the category of stimulus-independent perceptions, which draws together experiences such as hallucinations, mental imagery and dreams. Traditional divisions between medical and psychological sciences have contributed to these experiences being investigated separately. This review aims to examine their similarities and differences at the levels of...
Chronic nightmares are very common in psychiatric disorders, affecting up to 70% of patients with personality or post-traumatic stress disorders. In other psychiatric disorders, the relationships with nightmares are poorly known. This review aimed to clarify the relationship between nightmares and both mood and psychotic disorders. We performed a systematic literature search using the PubMed,...
Nightmares may signal failures in emotional and self-regulation. Drawing on ego-psychological theory, this study tested whether specific ego functions predict nightmare frequency beyond neuroticism. University students (N = 269) completed the Nightmare Experience Scale, Ego Functions Assessment, and Mini-IPIP Neuroticism Scale. Hierarchical regression showed ego functioning accounted for...
Transcultural psychiatry has increased awareness of alternative approaches to mental health and wellbeing, influencing developments in Western psychotherapeutic treatments. In this article, I look at the recent interest in alternative therapies by the U.S. military, which has explored the possibilities of lucid dreaming in order to help soldiers cope with the adverse mental and emotional...
The current global threat brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic has led to widespread social isolation, posing new challenges in dealing with metal suffering related to social distancing, and in quickly learning new social habits intended to prevent contagion. Neuroscience and psychology agree that dreaming helps people to cope with negative emotions and to learn from experience, but can dreaming...
STUDY OBJECTIVES Nurses are a group at high risk for nightmares, yet little is known about the rate of nightmare disorder and associated psychosocial factors in this group in part attributable to the lack of a self-report questionnaire to assess DSM-5 criteria for nightmare disorder. Aims of the current study were to 1) report on development and initial validity of a self-report measure of...
Children and adolescents who have experienced traumatic events demonstrate a variety of posttraumatic symptoms, including recurrent nightmares, as well as adverse reactions in the school setting. The current study examined nightmare symptoms, posttraumatic stress, sleep disturbance, and self- and teacher-reported school functioning of 64 youths in the Gaza Strip, ages 12 to 16, who have lived...
Background: Firefighters are vulnerable to irregular sleep patterns and sleep disturbance due to work characteristics such as shift work and frequent dispatch. However, there are few studies investigating intervention targeting sleep for firefighters. This preliminary study aimed to develop and test a sleep intervention, namely FIT-IN (Firefighter's Therapy for Insomnia and Nightmares), which...
Nightmare disorder and recurrent isolated sleep paralysis are rapid eye movement (REM) parasomnias that cause significant distress to those who suffer from them. Nightmare disorder can cause insomnia due to fear of falling asleep through dread of nightmare occurrence. Hyperarousal and impaired fear extinction are involved in nightmare generation, as well as brain areas involved in emotion...
In prior research the author focused on stimulation of the semicircular canal component of vestibular functioning and found a relationship between the frequency with which young adults spontaneously experience lucid dreaming and their responsiveness to caloric irrigation. In order to more fully explore the relationship between vestibular functioning and lucidity, the authors have compared the...
Both Jungian and transpersonal traditions regard meditative and related states as a positive unfolding of an advanced symbolic capacity, with their ostensibly “primitive” features actually being part of an abstractly based reorganization of experience rather than confirming the more traditional psychiatric assumptions of “primitivity” or “regression”. An important feature of long-term...
Sierro C, Leslie W, Putois B. Long-term effects of treatment for chronic nightmares: is imagery rehearsal therapy robust in the COVID-19 pandemic? J Clin Sleep Med. 2020;16(11):1993.
Oneiric Stupor (OS) in Agrypnia Excitata represents a peculiar condition characterized by the recurrence of stereotyped gestures such as mimicking daily-life activities associated with the reporting of a dream mentation consisting in a single oneiric scene. It arises in the context of a completely disorganized sleep structure lacking any physiological cyclic organization, thus, going beyond the...
The ancient Egyptians put quite a bit of emphasis on dreams, although they had no verb for dreaming. It may suggest that they did not consider it an activity but rather a visual phenomenon, which was an uncontrollable phenomenon external to the dreamer. They linked sleep to death (and afterlife), felt that the messages delivered in their dreams could achieve the desire, cure an illness, give...
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...
During REM sleep we normally experience dreams. However, there are other less common REM sleep phenomena, like lucid dreaming (LD), false awakening (FA), sleep paralysis (SP), and out of body experiences (OBE). LD occurs when one is conscious during dreaming, and FA occurs when one is dreaming but believes that has woken up. SP is characterized by skeletal muscle atonia and occurs mainly during...
The scientific study of dreams is oneirology, that seeks the relationship between dreaming and existing knowledge about the brain; understanding that how the brain functions during dreaming in accordance with memory shaping and mental disorders.