Peace of mind and anxiety in the waking state are related to the affective content of dreams

Sikka, Pilleriin; Pesonen, Henri

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-30721-1

“…Thus, nightmare patients would be more prone to emotional dysregulation, as suggested by one recent study reporting decreased mPFC activity during the viewing of negative pictures in these patients (Marquis et al, ). Furthermore, exerting ineffective emotional regulation strategies (e.g., fear suppression) and elevated anxiety during wakefulness may lead to increased excitability of negatively‐loaded memories at sleep‐onset or even during sleep (Malinowski, ; Schmidt & Gendolla, ; Sikka, Pesonen, & Revonsuo, ; Sikka, Revonsuo, Noreika, & Valli, ), namely in conditions where monitoring from the prefrontal cortex is reduced (Braun et al, ; Maquet et al, ). Such disruption in the regulation of emotions during wakefulness and sleep has been proposed as a major contributing factor to insomnia (Wassing et al, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fear in dreams and in wakefulness: Evidence for day/night affective homeostasis

Sterpenich

¹

,

Perogamvros

²

,

Tononi

³

et al. 2019

Human Brain Mapping

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Recent neuroscientific theories have proposed that emotions experienced in dreams contribute to the resolution of emotional distress and preparation for future affective reactions. We addressed one emerging prediction, namely that experiencing fear in dreams is associated with more adapted responses to threatening signals during wakefulness. Using a stepwise approach across two studies, we identified brain regions activated when experiencing fear in dreams and showed that frightening dreams modulated the response of these same regions to threatening stimuli during wakefulness. Specifically, in Study 1, we performed serial awakenings in 18 participants recorded throughout the night with high-density electroencephalography (EEG) and asked them whether they experienced any fear in their dreams. Insula and midcingulate cortex activity increased for dreams containing fear. In Study 2, we tested 89 participants and found that those reporting higher incidence of fear in their dreams showed reduced emotional arousal and fMRI response to fear-eliciting stimuli in the insula, amygdala and midcingulate cortex, while awake. Consistent with better emotion regulation processes, the same participants displayed increased medial prefrontal cortex activity. These findings support that emotions in dreams and wakefulness engage similar neural substrates, and substantiate a link between emotional processes occurring during sleep and emotional brain functions during wakefulness.

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“…Furthermore, exerting ineffective emotional regulation strategies (e.g. fear suppression) and elevated anxiety during wakefulness may lead to increased excitability of negatively-loaded memories at sleep-onset or even during sleep (Schmidt RE and GH Gendolla 2008;Malinowski J 2017;Sikka P et al 2018;Sikka P et al 2019), namely in conditions where monitoring from the prefrontal cortex is reduced (Maquet P et al 1996;Braun AR et al 1997). Such disruption in the regulation of emotions during wakefulness and sleep has been proposed as a major contributing factor to insomnia (Wassing R et al 2016).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fear in dreams and in wakefulness: evidence for day/night affective homeostasis

Sterpenich

¹

,

Perogamvros

²

,

Tononi

³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Recent neuroscientific theories have proposed that emotions experienced in dreams contribute to the resolution of emotional distress and preparation for future affective reactions. We addressed one emerging prediction, namely that experiencing fear in dreams is associated with more adapted responses to threatening signals during wakefulness. Using a stepwise approach across two studies, we identified brain regions activated when experiencing fear in dreams and showed that frightening dreams modulated the response of these same regions to threatening stimuli during wakefulness. Specifically, in Study 1, we performed serial awakenings in 18 participants recorded throughout the night with highdensity EEG and asked them whether they experienced any fear in their dreams. Insula and midcingulate cortex activity increased for dreams containing fear. In Study 2, we tested 89 participants and found that those reporting higher incidence of fear in their dreams showed reduced emotional arousal and fMRI response to fear-eliciting stimuli in the insula, amygdala and midcingulate cortex, while awake. Consistent with better emotion regulation processes, the same participants displayed increased medial prefrontal cortex activity. These findings support that emotions in dreams and wakefulness engage similar neural substrates, and substantiate a link between emotional processes occurring during sleep and emotional brain functions during wakefulness. SIGNIFICANT STATEMENTHighly debated while pivotal to current theoretical models of dreaming, the relationship between emotion processing during wakefulness and in dreams remains elusive. In a first study, we used high-density EEG recordings and observed that regions involved in fear processing (i.e. the insula and midcingulate cortex) were activated during fear-related dreams. This first finding demonstrates that emotions in dreams engage similar neural circuits as during wakefulness. In a second study, using fMRI, we show that higher incidence of fear in dreams was associated with reduced emotional arousal and brain responses indicative of better emotion regulation during wakefulness. Together, these results strongly support the idea that experiencing fear in a secure environment, as in dreams, relates to more adapted responses to threatening events in real life. 2000), others reported a balance of positive and negative emotions (Schredl M and E Doll 1998), or found that joy and emotions related to approach behaviors may prevail (Fosse R et al. 2001;Malcolm-Smith S et al. 2012). When performing a lexicostatistical analysis of large datasets of dream reports, a clear dissociation between dreams containing basic, mostly fear-related, emotions and those with other more social emotions (e.g. embarrassment, excitement, frustration) was found, highlighting distinct affective modes operating during dreaming, with fear in dreams representing a prevalent and biologically-relevant emotional category (Revonsuo A 2000;Schwartz S 2004). Thus, if fear-containing dreams serve an emotion regulation f...

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“…We selected these factors because they are present in theoretical work [ 26 , 27 , 31 ], and our data make it possible to test them. Having these five factors, we tested whether the ways dreams are mediated by them are similar to the ways the literature has reported everyday life to be mediated by them.…”

Section: Research Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The ‘nocturnal therapist’ has also been found to help find innovative solutions to problems: while dreaming, the mind attempts to solve a problem by looking at it from unusual perspectives [ 3 , 4 ]. The only quantitative work on the nocturnal therapist hypothesis focused on dream affect [ 31 ], and showed that individuals whose dream reports contained more positive affect and emotions also exhibited higher well-being and life satisfaction.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Our dreams, our selves: automatic analysis of dream reports

Fogli

¹

,

Aiello

²

,

Quercia

³

2020

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Sleep scientists have shown that dreaming helps people improve their waking lives, and they have done so by developing sophisticated content analysis scales. Dream analysis entails time-consuming manual annotation of text. That is why dream reports have been recently mined with algorithms, and these algorithms focused on identifying emotions. In so doing, researchers have not tackled two main technical challenges though: (i) how to mine aspects of dream reports that research has found important, such as characters and interactions; and (ii) how to do so in a principled way grounded in the literature. To tackle these challenges, we designed a tool that automatically scores dream reports by operationalizing the widely used dream analysis scale by Hall and Van de Castle. We validated the tool’s effectiveness on hand-annotated dream reports (the average error is 0.24), scored 24 000 reports—far more than any previous study—and tested what sleep scientists call the ‘continuity hypothesis’ at this unprecedented scale: we found supporting evidence that dreams are a continuation of what happens in everyday life. Our results suggest that it is possible to quantify important aspects of dreams, making it possible to build technologies that bridge the current gap between real life and dreaming.

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Peace of mind and anxiety in the waking state are related to the affective content of dreams

Cited by 46 publications

References 101 publications

Fear in dreams and in wakefulness: Evidence for day/night affective homeostasis

Fear in dreams and in wakefulness: Evidence for day/night affective homeostasis

Fear in dreams and in wakefulness: evidence for day/night affective homeostasis

Our dreams, our selves: automatic analysis of dream reports

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