This paper presents a theoretical review of rapid eye movement sleep with a special focus on pontine-geniculate-occipital waves and what they might tell us about the functional anatomy of sleep and consciousness. In particular, we review established ideas about the nature and purpose of sleep in terms of protoconsciousness and free energy minimization. By combining these theoretical...
Nightmare disorder is a prevalent parasomnia characterized by vivid and highly unpleasant dream experiences during night time sleep. The neural background of disturbed dreaming was proposed to be associated with impaired prefrontal and fronto-limbic functioning during REM sleep. We hypothesized that the impaired prefrontal and fronto-limbic functioning in subjects with frequent nightmares would...
Abnormalities in the sleep/wake cycle and within sleep itself have extensively been studied in a broad range of psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. Despite increasing evidence for a mechanistic overlap between the disruptions of circadian timing control and neuropathology, the relationship remains unclear (Wulff et al., 2010). One possible way to address this problem from a psychiatric...
Intrinsic and historical weaknesses delayed the spread of a sound neurobiological investigation on dreaming. Nevertheless, recent independent findings confirm the hypothesis that the neurophysiological mechanisms of encoding and recall of episodic memories are largely comparable across wakefulness and sleep. Brain lesion and neuroimaging studies converge in indicating that...
The term lucid dream designates a dream in which the dreamer, while dreaming, is aware he or she is dreaming. Whereas lucid dreaming has been studied in adults, large-scaled surveys in children are scarce. The sample here included 3579 children for the ages from 6 to 18 who completed a brief questionnaire distributed in UK libraries. 43.5% reported having had at least one lucid dream. As...
This study evaluates gender differences in dream recall frequency, dream sharing frequency, dream listening frequency and nightmare frequency in childhood and adolescence. The sample included 3534 children for the ages from 6 to 18 who completed a brief questionnaire distributed in libraries. We were able to show that overall girls recalled dreams more often, shared dreams more often, listened...
This study investigated the effects of stressors for university students and their big five personality traits on dream recall frequency classified by dream emotion. The following results were obtained: i) stressors and Neuroticism had an interactive effect on dream recall frequency. ii) Stressors had main effects on sad, anxious, and unpleasant dream recall frequency. iii) Extroversion was...
We assessed dream recall frequency (DRF) and dream theme diversity (DTD) with an internet questionnaire among a cohort of 28,888 male and female participants aged 10-79 years in a cross-sectional design. DRF increased from adolescence (ages 10-19) to early adulthood (20-29) and then decreased again for the next 20 years. The nature of this decrease differed for males and females. For males, it...
The study of higher-order cognition in dreaming was guided by the question “What are the scope and purpose of thinking/strategizing efforts as one of three previously identified direct mental problem-solving modalities (Kozmová, 2008; 2012) that some dreamers are capable of using to resolve the novelties of felt-need situations encountered during non-lucid dreaming?” The research utilized...
This study extended previous research by comparing dream content and discovery passages from the dreams of Canadian and Italian patients who were undergoing psychodynamically-oriented psychotherapy. Thirty Italians and 30 Canadians (17 males and 13 females) completed The Storytelling Method of Dream Interpretation in either Italian or English. Dream and discovery content was analyzed via the...