Nightmares are highly prevalent and distressing for the sufferer, which underlines the need for well-documented treatments. A comprehensive literature review and meta-analysis of the effects of different pharmacological placebo-controlled randomized clinical trials, covering the period up to 1 December 2022, was performed. Searches were conducted in PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, PsychInfo,...
Working with dreams in groups allows an understanding of phenomena that characterise the unconscious as a total unity. The dreamer becomes the vehicle of emotions, fantasies, and anxieties that dominate the group at a given moment, allowing them to be understood and processed. The analysis of shared dreams can further our understanding of emotional concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic and...
Nightmares occur across a wide range of psychiatric disorders, but outside of PTSD presentations are infrequently considered a treatment priority. We aimed to assess evidence for a contributory causal role of nightmares to the occurrence of psychiatric disorders, and vice versa. A systematic review was conducted of longitudinal, experimental, and clinical trial studies. Twenty-four...
Introduction: Dreaming is the subjective experience during sleep. A spontaneous thought is a thought that comes to one's mind involuntarily. This study investigated whether presleep focusing on a positive spontaneous thought enhanced the possibility of dreaming of the thought. Methods: Ninety-seven participants were quasi-randomly assigned to an expression condition (focus on an spontaneous...
Les émotions sont un aspect marquant des rêves : elles pourraient jouer un rôle dans le maintien du bien être des individus en traitant les souvenirs négatifs et en préparant aux menaces à venir. Elles surviennent surtout lors des rêves de sommeil paradoxal (SP), qui comporte une paralysie musculaire, une activité EEG rapide et des mouvements oculaires rapides (MOR). Comprendre si ce rôle de...
Dream recall frequency and lucid dream frequency showed large inter-individual differences that are partly related to personality dimensions. However, as dream research is a small field, independent studies are necessary to build a solid empirical foundation. The present online survey included 1,537 participants (1150 women, 387 men) with a mean age of 35.1 ± 15.8 years. Whereas the...
Dreams are often viewed as fascinating but relatively irrelevant mental epihenomena of the sleeping mind with questionable or no functional relevance. Despite long hours of oneiric activity, and high individual differences in dream recall, dream amnesia is one of the most robust and universal features of dreaming. In this review, we conceptualize dreaming and dream amnesia as inherent aspects...
Background: It is uncommon for dreamers to be aware of their dreaming status while being inside their own dream. Yet, it is possible to become mindful and conscious of the fact that one is dreaming. This fairly rare phenomenon is called lucid dreaming. Cognitive functions are preserved while sleeping, and in the case of trained and experienced lucid dreamers, this also permits them to manage...
Objective: Nightmares seem to predict suicidal behaviors, and the aim of this study is to explore the chronology and trajectories of alterations in dream contents before a suicidal crisis, distinguishing 3 different experiences: bad dreams, nightmares, and suicidal scenarios during dreams. Methods: This naturalistic study included individuals hospitalized between January 2021 and May 2021 in a...
Nightmare disorder (ND) is characterized by dreams with strong negative emotions occurring during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. ND is mainly treated by imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT), where the patients are asked to change the negative story line of their nightmare to a more positive one. We here used targeted memory reactivation (TMR) during REM sleep to strengthen IRT-related memories and...
Lucid dreaming is being conscious within one’s own dream. In recent years, dream lucidity has started to attract more attention not only from the broad neuroscience field but also from applied neurology, psychiatry, sports performance science, or art therapy areas. The aim of this research is to investigate and evaluate some of the therapeutic potentials of dream lucidity. The findings propose...
Journal of Sleep ResearchNovember 9, 2022Britta Dumser, Gabriela G. Werner, Thomas W. Ehring et al.6 citations
Nightmares are considerably prevalent in the general population and are known to be closely associated with a variety of mental disorders. However, not much is known about the immediate antecedents and consequences of nightmares. Therefore, we used intensive longitudinal assessments to investigate the night-to-night within-person associations between nightmares on the one hand and fear of...
Nightmares are a substantial burden for sleep quality. Previous studies have shown that traumatic experiences can increase the probability of nightmares, and also waking-life distress can enhance this effect. There is evidence that the intensity of negative dream emotions is more responsible for rating a dream as a nightmare than threatening dream contents. However, there is still a lack of...
L'EncephaleNovember 1, 2022J. Hulot, Jean-Baptiste Roseau, D. Gomez-Mérino et al.
INTRODUCTION Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a major public health problem. The most frequent complaints in this pathology are sleep disorders and trauma-related nightmares in particular. Trauma-related nightmares are characteristic of PTSD and impact its severity insofar as they are associated with more severe, longer-lasting symptoms and resistance to first-line treatments. There are...
Lucid dreaming (LD) is a mental state in which we realize not being awake but are dreaming while asleep. It often involves vivid, perceptually intense dream images as well as peculiar kinesthetic sensations, such as flying, levitating, or out-of-body experiences. LD is in the cross-spotlight of cognitive neuroscience and sleep research as a particular case to study consciousness, cognition, and...
Lucid dreams, in which the dreamers are aware that they are dreaming, can be a source of spiritual and mystical experiences. This empirical study aimed to explore the relationship between lucid dreaming and spirituality, taking into account the role of mystical lucid dream experience, in an online sample of 471 respondents, 95% of whom had lucid dream experience and 65% were frequent lucid...
Sleep parasomnias have drawn the interest of sleep experts because they represent a valuable window to directly monitor dream activity and sleep mentation associated with nocturnal events. Indeed, parasomnias and their manifestations are helpful in investigating dream activity and features, overcoming methodological limits that affect dream study. Specifically, REM sleep Behavior Disorder (RBD)...
OBJECTIVE: Frequent nightmare behavior or deep nightmare experiences may harm the physical and mental health and performance of athletes. This study explores the nightmare experiences of athletes, and includes non-athletes with similar experiences for comparison. METHODS: The Nightmare Experience Questionnaire (NEQ); Zuckerman-Kuhlman-Aluja Personality Questionnaire, Shortened Form (ZKA-PQ/SF);...
Based in large part on four different types of descriptive empirical findings, which are inconsistent to varying degrees with every theory of dream function that has been proposed, this chapter argues that dreaming has no adaptive function.In addition, still other empirical findings refute specific aspects of one or another adaptive theory.The four general findings are already familiar to...
Several factors influencing dream recall frequency (DRF) have been identified, but some remain poorly understood. One way to study DRF is to compare cognitive processes in low and high dream recallers (LR and HR). According to the arousal-retrieval model, long-term memory encoding of a dream requires wakefulness while its multisensory short-term memory is still alive. Previous studies showed...