Methodological Recommendations to Control for Factors Influencing Dream and Nightmare Recall in Clinical and Experimental Studies of Dreaming

Putois, Benjamin; Leslie, Wendy; Asfeld, Claire; Sierro, Caroline; Higgins, Susan; Ruby, Perrine

doi:10.3389/fneur.2020.00724

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 112 publications

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“…This finding may indicate that having a great amount of intra-sleep awakenings (and possibly REM sleep) before treatment is maladaptive and/or reflect a failure of REM-sleep emotional regulation mechanisms. Intra-sleep awakenings are known to be positively correlated with dream recall frequency 81 , 101 which is correlated with nightmares frequency 102 . Patients with the more intra-sleep awakenings may thus also be the ones with the more nightmare recall, and intra-sleep awakenings may interrupt the regulation process during REM sleep.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sleep parameters improvement in PTSD soldiers after symptoms remission

Rousseau

Vallat

Coste

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) is a psychotherapy for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is still unclear whether symptoms remission through EMDR therapy is associated with a beneficial effect on one of the PTSD symptoms, sleep disturbance. Our objective was therefore to study sleep parameters before and after symptom remission in soldiers with PTSD. The control group consisted of 20 healthy active duty military men who slept in a sleep lab with standard polysomnography (PSG) on two sessions separated by one month. The patient group consisted of 17 active duty military with PTSD who underwent EMDR therapy. PSG-recorded sleep was assessed 1 week before the EMDR therapy began and 1 week after PTSD remission. We found that the increased REMs density after remission was positively correlated with a greater decrease of symptoms. Also, the number of EMDR sessions required to reach remission was correlated with intra-sleep awakenings before treatment. These results confirm the improvement of some sleep parameters in PTSD after symptoms remission in a soldier's population and provide a possible predictor of treatment success. Further experiments will be required to establish whether this effect is specific to the EMDR therapy.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sleep parameters improvement in PTSD soldiers after symptoms remission

Rousseau

Vallat

Coste

et al. 2021

Sci Rep

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“…Up to now, dream recall frequency (DRF) has been reliably related to some personality traits (such as creativity, openness to experience and thin/thick boundaries) but not to some cognitive abilities (Ruby 2011; e.g. memory or visual imagery, for reviews Putois et al 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

High dream recall frequency is associated with an increase of both bottom-up and top-down attentional processes

et al. 2021

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Event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with the involuntary orientation of (bottom-up) attention toward an unexpected sound are of larger amplitude in high dream recallers (HR) than in low dream recallers (LR) during passive listening, suggesting different attentional functioning. We measured bottom-up and top-down attentional performance and their cerebral correlates in 18 HR (11 women, age = 22.7 years, dream recall frequency = 5.3 days with a dream recall per week) and 19 LR (10 women, age = 22.3, DRF = 0.2) using EEG and the Competitive Attention Task. Between-group differences were found in ERPs but not in behavior. The results show that HR present larger ERPs to distracting sounds than LR even during active listening, arguing for enhanced bottom-up processing of irrelevant sounds. HR also presented larger contingent negative variation during target expectancy and P3b to target sounds than LR, speaking for an enhanced recruitment of top-down attention. The attentional balance seems preserved in HR since their performances are not altered, but possibly at a higher resource cost. In HR, increased bottom-up processes would favor dream recall through awakening facilitation during sleep and enhanced top-down processes may foster dream recall through increased awareness and/or short-term memory stability of dream content.

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“…Many confounding factors make the study of dream and epilepsy interaction challenging. Longitudinal studies which aim at specifically identifying epileptic activity-related dream modulation would allow to overcome the many biases (underlying epileptogenic condition, comorbidities, treatments) of studies comparing patients and healthy subjects ( Putois et al, 2020 ). A first step could be to more systematically question the epileptic patients explored with video-EEG about their dreams, especially after nocturnal seizures.…”

Section: Discussion and Perspective: Current Research Gaps And Potential Future Developments In The Fieldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relationship Between Epilepsy and Dreaming: Current Knowledge, Hypotheses, and Perspectives

et al. 2021

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The interactions between epilepsy and sleep are numerous and the impact of epilepsy on cognition is well documented. Epilepsy is therefore likely to influence dreaming as one sleep-related cognitive activity. The frequency of dream recall is indeed decreased in patients with epilepsy, especially in those with primary generalized seizures. The content of dreams is also disturbed in epilepsy patients, being more negative and with more familiar settings. While several confounding factors (anti-seizure medications, depression and anxiety disorders, cognitive impairment) may partly account for these changes, some observations suggest an effect of seizures themselves on dreams. Indeed, the incorporation of seizure symptoms in dream content has been described, concomitant or not with a focal epileptic discharge during sleep, suggesting that epilepsy might directly or indirectly interfere with dreaming. These observations, together with current knowledge on dream neurophysiology and the links between epilepsy and sleep, suggest that epilepsy may impact not only wake- but also sleep-related cognition.

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Methodological Recommendations to Control for Factors Influencing Dream and Nightmare Recall in Clinical and Experimental Studies of Dreaming

Cited by 7 publications

References 112 publications

Sleep parameters improvement in PTSD soldiers after symptoms remission

Sleep parameters improvement in PTSD soldiers after symptoms remission

High dream recall frequency is associated with an increase of both bottom-up and top-down attentional processes

Relationship Between Epilepsy and Dreaming: Current Knowledge, Hypotheses, and Perspectives

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