Dreaming, a universal phenomenon linked to REM sleep, arises from intricate interactions between limbic regions, cortical networks, and neurotransmitter dynamics. Neuroimaging highlights amygdala and hippocampal hyperactivity alongside prefrontal cortex hypoactivity, elucidating the emotional vividness and cognitive disorganization of dreams. Cholinergic pathways drive REM sleep, while...
Lucid dreaming (LD) is a state of conscious awareness of the ongoing oneiric state, predominantly linked to REM sleep. Progress in understanding its neurobiological basis has been hindered by small sample sizes, diverse EEG setups, and artifacts like saccadic eye movements. To address these challenges in characterizing the electrophysiological correlates of LD, we introduced an adaptive...
Human creative activities have been postulated to be related to insomnia and dreaming during sleep. The current preliminary cross-sectional study investigated the associations between insomnia, dreaming, and creativity of choreography in young female dancers. Forty-six female contemporary dancers were included in the present online study and divided into two groups, creative choreographic...
Throughout history, the development of new sleep medicines has been driven by progress in our understanding of the mechanisms underlying sleep. Ancient civilisations used their understanding of the sedative nature of natural herbs and compounds to induce sleep. The discovery of barbiturates and bromides heralded a new era of synthetic sleep medicine in the 19th century. This was followed by the...
Researchers have established that dreams are intensely social and populated by diverse characters, including important figures from the dreamer's daily life. This study examines the types of characters that appeared in participant dreams over two weeks. We found that the majority of dreams include strangers in addition to known individuals, and that personality measures impact the likelihood of...
SleepMay 1, 2025Kira Clare, Riona Yoshida, Kimberly Savin et al.
Nightmares and insomnia commonly co-occur with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), with 70% to 91% of individuals with PTSD reporting chronic nightmares and insomnia. Evidence suggests that even gold standard treatments for PTSD (such as Prolonged Exposure, PE) and insomnia (CBT-I) individually may not fully resolve nightmares. Our study presents secondary analyses of a randomized controlled...
A robust body of research has linked nightmares to suicide. For example, research has found that nightmares predict suicidal ideation above and beyond other mental health symptoms (such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder) and that treating nightmares may indirectly decrease the risk of suicide. Considering the established link between nightmares and suicide, our goal was to...
Nightmares and non-nightmare sleep disturbances are a core feature of posttraumatic stress disorder. Effective treatments remain elusive. Doxazosin is an alpha-1 adrenergic blocker with demonstrated promise, but there is a dearth of evidence from randomized controlled trials on its effectiveness. We report findings from a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial evaluating the...
Fear of sleep engenders arousal at bedtime that can promote nightmares. Living in disadvantaged neighborhoods with high rates of community violence may exacerbate fear of sleep and in turn increase nightmare risk. We tested fear of sleep among acute trauma patients as a prospective predictor of nightmares, and whether exposure to community violence moderated this relationship. Patients...
Many studies involving the relationship between personality and nightmare frequency (NF), common in cross-sectional data, have only looked at neuroticism in isolation, assumed a linear relationship, or did not include nightmare disorder index (NDI) to determine if personality traits might predict NDI over NF. While neuroticism is the personality trait most commonly associated with nightmares,...