Sleep and dream habits in a sample of French college students who report no sleep disorders

Abstract

There is a lack of up-to-date data on sleep and dream habits of college students. To fill in this gap, we used an online questionnaire sent to the student mailing lists of two major universities of Lyon (Lyon 1 and Lyon 2) for the recruitment of an functional magnetic resonance imaging study with sleep disorders as exclusion criteria. In the sample (1,137 French college students, 411 males, mean age = 22.2 ± 2.4 years, body mass index = 22.0 ± 3.2 kg m ), on average, the participants reported spending about 8 hr in bed during weekdays, 9 hr during the weekends, and 90.9% of them reported no difficulty falling asleep. Less than 0.4% of students reported to have sleep-walking episodes regularly, but nearly 7% reported regular sleep-talking episodes. The average dream recall frequency was about 3 mornings per week with a dream in mind. Dream recall frequency was positively correlated with the clarity of dream content and the frequency of lucid dreaming, and was negatively correlated with age. Fourteen percent of the students reported frequent lucid dreams, and 6% reported frequent recurrent dreams. We found a gender effect for several sleep and dream parameters, including dream recall frequency and time in bed, both of which were higher in women than in men. We have also observed differences between academic disciplines, namely humanities students (Lyon 2) reported spending more time in bed than sciences students (Lyon 1). These results confirm a gender difference for several sleep and dream parameters, and suggest a link between academic disciplines and sleep duration.

Dream Recall Frequency Is Associated With Medial Prefrontal Cortex White-Matter Density

“…Data for this study comes from two distinct neuroimaging studies ( Eichenlaub et al, 2014b ; Vallat et al, 2018b ). In both studies, the main inclusion criterion was self-reported habitual weekly DRF, assessed by questionnaires ( Vallat et al, 2018a ). The inclusion criteria for HR were at least 3 days per week with a dream recall, and for LR, at most 2 days per month with a dream recall.…”

“…For that reason, most empirical investigation of dreaming (be it the investigation of dream content, or frequency) are based on the study of dream memories reported after the awakening of the dreamer (e.g., Schwartz and Maquet, 2002 ; Fosse et al, 2003 ; Schredl et al, 2003 ; Schwartz, 2003 ; Zadra and Robert, 2012 ; Windt, 2013 ; Vallat et al, 2017a ). Studies on dreaming have thus highlighted the cognitive and cerebral correlates of dream recall, either by investigating the EEG in the minutes preceding an awakening followed (or not) by a dream recall ( Esposito et al, 2004 ; Wittmann et al, 2004 ; Chellappa et al, 2011 ; Marzano et al, 2011 ; Scarpelli et al, 2015 ; Siclari et al, 2017 ), or by evaluating the cognitive and brain functioning associated with high and low DRF using behavioral methods, EEG or fMRI ( Ruby, 2011 for a review; Eichenlaub et al, 2014a , b ; Vallat et al, 2017b , 2018a ).…”

Is There a Link Between Frequency of Dreams, Lucid Dreams, and Subjective Sleep Quality?

“…There are few up-to-date investigations of sleep quality and dream experience frequencies among French students; a previous study was performed on 1,137 students (Vallat et al, 2018). The students who were selected in the study of Vallat et al (2018) were those who did not report any sleep disorders; as a consequence of this selection, the sleep quality possibly have been overestimated and it could be a need to extend such type of study to a more open to everybody sample without any precise inclusion criteria. To our knowledge, there are no studies describing and comparing the results of dream experiences frequency and sleep quality obtained with French students and with a general population sample using the same methodology.…”

Key Concepts in Dream Research: Cognition and Consciousness Are Inherently Linked, but Do No Not Control “Control”!

“…However, in order to engage the frontal faculties sufficiently to warrant accurate reality monitoring, an atypical neurological profile is engaged (Voss et al, 2014 ). It is therefore important to note that lucidity is infrequent and abnormal (Vallat et al, 2018 ), and as such likely does not reflect “normal” cognition and consciousness during sleep, particularly when extensive training is necessary in order to create pre-requisite conditions for lucidity to emerge (e.g., Baird et al, 2019 ). Nevertheless, LD can be reliably measured, in laboratory conditions, by asking trained participants to move their eyes systematically whilst lucid (Mota-Rolim, 2020 ), and it is recognized that LD may provide insights into the nature of consciousness (Baird et al, 2019 ), albeit in a more artificial than naturally-occurring environment.…”