Riv Psichiatr 2014; 49(4): 187-191 187 RIASSUNTO. Introduzione. Sleep disturbances have long been considered as a cardinal symptom of endogenous depression and dreams in depressed patients usually differ from those of healthy people. The aim of the present study was to investigate dream subjective experiences and their modifications in relation to clinical response in a group of escitalopram-tr...

Models of dream analysis either assume a continuum of waking and dreaming or the existence of two dissociated realities. Both approaches rely on different methodology. Whereas continuity models are based on content analysis, discontinuity models use a structural approach. In our study, we applied both methods to test specific hypotheses about continuity or discontinuity. We contrasted dream rep...

This paper, which is limited to the art of painting, aims to support the idea that a substantial insertion of concepts and methods drawn on dream psychology and dream neuroscience can contribute to the advancements of Neuroesthetics. The historical and scientific reasons are discussed that have determined the so far poor role played by the dream phenomenon in the developments of Neuroesthetics....

Dream content is more coherent, consistent over time, and continuous with waking emotional concerns than the activation-synthesis theory would predict. It cannot easily accommodate the fact that children under age 5 have infrequent and bland dreams even though they have normal Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. It is not consistent with the fact that there are patients with forebrain lesions who d...

In 1953, Aserinsky and Kleitman published their paper on the so-called REM sleep which accounts for about 20 % of the total sleep time in adults. REM sleep is characterized by rapid eye movements, activated EEG and muscle atonia. Awakenings from REM sleep are very often accompanied by reports of intense dreaming (1). Since REM sleep occurs regularly every night in every human being, it can be a...

We investigated the role of the dopamine system [i.e., subcortical-medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) network] in dreaming, by studying patients with Parkinson's Disease (PD) as a model of altered dopaminergic transmission. Subcortical volumes and cortical thickness were extracted by 3T-MR images of 27 PD patients and 27 age-matched controls, who were asked to fill out a dream diary upon morning a...

In the developing mouse brain, once the generation of neurons is mostly completed during the prenatal period, precisely coordinated signals act on competent neural precursors to direct their differentiation into astrocytes, which occurs mostly after birth. Among these signals, those provided by neurotrophic cytokines and bone morphogenetic proteins appear to have a key role in triggering the ne...

Although the variability of dream content is large, typical dream themes that occur quite often and are reported by many people can be identified (e.g., being chased, falling, flying, failing an examination, being unable to find a toilet or restroom). The present study is an investigation of the stability of the rank order of the dream themes and of gender differences in the content of dreams. ...