The development of PTSD symptoms after traumatic injury is associated with a more fragmented pattern of REM sleep.

No abstract

Dreams following trauma have been suggested to aid emotional adaptation, yet trauma‐related nightmares are a diagnostic symptom of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). There is little published data relating dreams to PTSD soon after trauma. We assessed dreams and PTSD in 60 injured patients after life‐threatening events and obtained follow‐up assessments in 39 of these participants 6 weeks later. Ten of 21 dream reports from morning diaries were rated and described as similar to the recent traumatic event. The participants reporting these distressing “trauma dreams” had more severe concurrent PTSD symptoms than those reporting other categories of dreams and had more severe initial and follow‐up PTSD than those without dream recall. These findings along with our preliminary longitudinal observations relating changes in dream patterns to outcome, suggest a relationship of dream characteristics and early adaptive versus maladaptive patterns of processing traumatic memory.

Temporal stability is an important fundamental quality when measuring sleep parameters, yet it has been infrequently assessed. Generalizability theory was used to estimate the short-term temporal stability of five variables commonly used to characterize insomnia: sleep onset latency, total sleep time, wake after sleep onset, time in bed, and sleep efficiency. Estimates were calculated for 32 elderly primary insomniacs and 32 elderly normal sleepers, both in the lab and at home, using both sleep logs and polysomnography (PSG). A week of recording using either PSG or sleep logs was typically sufficient to achieve adequate stability (defined as G coefficient of at least 0.80) with some notable exceptions: (a) when using log-derived measures with insomniacs, a 3-week average was necessary for wake after sleep onset and (b) more than a 2-week average was necessary for sleep onset latency. Because of the substantial commitment involved in the physiological recording of sleep, alternative forms of aggregation are considered with the intent of improving temporal stability.