Dreaming and large language model hallucination are usually studied apart, one as biology and the other as engineering. We argue they are two expressions of a single computation: generative reconstruction from distributed memory under incomplete constraints. Neither the sleeping brain nor an autoregressive model retrieves stored records; both synthesize output by recombining learned...
Abstract Sleep and dreaming have long been hypothesized to serve a functional role in emotion regulation. Here, we investigated how reactivating highly emotional autobiographical memories prior to sleep affects dream content and subsequent emotional appraisal of these memories. Participants (N = 42) completed the Autobiographical Emotional Memory Task (AEMT) prior to bed for three consecutive...
The author analyzes a dream of an underworld journey undertaken with his deceased parents. Coincident with this dream is an e-mail communication from a patient whose son had recently died and whose wife is currently undergoing treatment for a fatal condition. Last year, at the time of the son’s death, the author and his patient had had a mutual dream of “waking up dead.” Now, realizing his...
Objectives: This study conducted a systematic evaluation of polysomnographic differences between individuals with nightmares and healthy controls. Methods: Electronic searches of All EBM databases, EMBASE, Web of Science, and MEDLINE identified 14 eligible case-control studies; seven studies involving 112 individuals with nightmares and 112 controls were included in meta-analysis. Results: The...
Le rêve lucide survient lorsqu’un individu prend conscience de rêver en cours de rêve, et s’accompagne souvent d’un sentiment accru d’autonomie et de contrôle. Cette capacité de réflexivité et d’action volontaire a été associée à des bénéfices personnels, thérapeutiques et spirituels, et a suscité l’intérêt des traditions scientifiques et contemplatives. L’un des mécanismes proposés pour...
Nature MedicineSeptember 2026Stefan Roepke, Nikola Schoofs, Kathlen Priebe et al.
Nightmares are a hallmark of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), yet pharmacological treatments remain limited. Here we conducted a multicenter, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial to evaluate the efficacy and safety of dronabinol (BX-1; Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC)) for PTSD-related nightmares. Adults with PTSD and recurrent nightmares were randomly assigned to receive...
ABSTRACT This narrative‐driven article explores the dream worlds of people in Bogotá’s downtown drug markets ( ollas ) and rehab centers ( patios ) following the Colombian state's 2016 militarized drug market raids. Drawing on twenty‐one months of fieldwork, it takes up dreams not as residues of a bounded psyche but as co‐constructed worlds where the dead and other forces act upon or orient the...
Drawing on Bernard Lahire's sociological approach to dreams and revisiting its critical dialogue with Bourdieu, this article presents dreaming as an involuntary modality of reflexivity: an internal communication in which the subject reflects on existential concerns experienced in waking life. Like other forms of reflexivity—from artistic self-expression to reflections articulated on the...
We argue that diffusion-based action models provide the structural prerequisites for minimal self-awareness in humanoid robots in a way that standard reactive feedforward policies do not. Three major theories of self-awareness—Friston’s Free Energy Principle (Friston, 2010), Metzinger’s Phenomenal Self-Model Theory (Metzinger, 2003), and Damasio’s two-level self (Damasio,...
The association between sleep-related phenomena and psychosis has received increasing attention in recent years, as sleep disturbances (e.g., insomnia) have shown robust associations with psychotic symptoms. However, the role of other, more specific sleep processes in psychosis remains unclear, despite their potential importance as symptom-related correlates. Particularly, phenomena such as...
Distressing dreams or nightmares about a traumatic experience are common among trauma-exposed individuals and contribute to the maintenance of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. Like other intrusive reexperiencing symptoms, trauma-related nightmares are characterized by vivid sensory details and heightened emotional intensity. However, little is known about their underlying...
Nightmares are overrepresented in psychiatric disorders and are strongly associated with suicidality, especially in Major Depressive Episode (MDE). This study had two main objectives: (1) to determine an optimal diagnostic cutoff for the Nightmare Severity Index (NSI) to identify Nightmare Disorder (ND), and (2) to compare the clinical profiles of MDE patients with ND (MDE-ND) and without ND...
Lucid dreaming, defined as the experience of becoming aware of dreaming while dreaming, offers a unique window into a state of consciousness characterised by a blending of the sensory vividness of REM sleep with the self-awareness of wakefulness. While past functional imaging has shed light on the neural activity supporting lucid dreaming, the structural brain correlates of lucid dream...
Dreaming during anaesthesia has been documented for over a century, yet it remains poorly understood. This scoping review synthesises evidence on the frequency, phenomenology, predictors, outcomes, and neural correlates of anaesthesia dreaming. We systematically searched multiple databases for studies examining anaesthesia dreaming, including clinical trials, observational studies, and...
Why do humans produce dysphoric dreams and nightmares at all? This paper develops a cautious evolutionary theory of unpleasant dreaming by extending the logic of evolutionary psychiatry to dream life. Research on dream continuity suggests that dreams are not detached from waking mental life, but instead reflect current concerns, emotional preoccupations, memory fragments, and bodily states....
The prevalence of nightmares appears to be highly variable in this current literature on nightmares, ranging from low in healthy populations (6% to 11%), to slightly higher in those with medical problems (12% to 13%), significantly higher in individuals with neurological conditions (24% to 30%) and again significantly higher in those with psychiatric diagnoses (27% to 62%). Medical...
Nightmares are common after sexual assault and may play an important role in the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, little research has examined daily temporal associations between nightmares and PTSD symptoms in the acute aftermath of sexual assault. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) was used to test within- and between-person associations between nightmares and...
Current electroencephalography (EEG)-based dream detection relies on power spectral density (PSD) and statistical moment features, achieving a state-of-the-art area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of approximately 0.70 on the DREAM database (Wong et al., 2025, Nature Communications). We introduce PHINN-EEG (Persistent Homology Inspired Neural Network for EEG), the first...