Local Neuronal Synchronization in Frequent Nightmare Recallers and Healthy Controls: A Resting-State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study.

Nightmares are highly dysphoric dreams that are well-remembered upon awakening. Frequent nightmares have been associated with psychopathology and emotional dysregulation, yet their neural mechanisms remain largely unknown. Our neurocognitive model posits that nightmares reflect dysfunction in a limbic-prefrontal circuit comprising medial prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, hippocampus, and amygdala.

Early childhood adversity associations with nightmare severity and sleep spindles.

Objective: Childhood adversity figures prominently in the clinical histories of children and adolescents suffering from a panoply of physical, mental or sleep disorders, including posttraumatic stress disorder. But the nature and prevalence of early adversity in the case of idiopathic nightmare-prone individuals have received little study. We characterize the types and frequencies of self-reported childhood adversity for nightmare-prone individuals using the developmentally sensitive Traumatic Antecedents Questionnaire (TAQ) and assess relationships between separation adversity and sleep spindles.

Nightmare Severity Is Inversely Related to Frontal Brain Activity During Waking State Picture Viewing.

Study Objectives: Growing evidence suggests that nightmares have considerable adverse effects on waking behavior, possibly by increasing post-sleep negative emotions. Dysphoric reactions to nightmares are one component of nightmare severity for which the neural correlates are unknown. Here, we investigate possible neural correlates of nightmare severity in a sample of individuals who frequently recall nightmares.

REM Sleep Theta Changes in Frequent Nightmare Recallers.

Study Objectives: To replicate and expand upon past research by evaluating sleep and wake electroencephalographic spectral activity in samples of frequent nightmare (NM) recallers and healthy controls.

Methods: Computation of spectral activity for sleep (non-REM and REM) and wake electroencephalogram recordings from 18 frequent NM recallers and 15 control participants.

Results: There was higher "slow-theta" (2-5 Hz) for NM recallers than for controls during wake, non-REM sleep and REM sleep.

Nightmare sufferers show atypical emotional semantic associations and prolonged REM sleep-dependent emotional priming.

Study Objectives: The objective of this study was to investigate whether nightmare (NM) sufferers exhibit an abnormal network of emotional semantic associations as measured by a recently developed, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep-sensitive, associational breadth (AB) task.

Design: NM sufferers were compared to healthy controls (CTL) for their performance on an emotional AB task containing positive and negative cue words both before and after a nap with REM sleep. AB was assessed in both a priming condition, where cue words were explicitly memorized before sleep, and a non-priming condition, where cue words were not memorized.

Infrequent dream recall associated with low performance but high overnight improvement on mirror-tracing.

Although sleep facilitates learning and memory, the roles of dreaming and habitual levels of recalling dreams remain unknown. This study examined if performance and overnight improvement on a rapid eye movement sleep-sensitive visuomotor task is associated differentially with habitually high or low dream recall frequency. As a relation between dream production and visuospatial skills has been demonstrated previously, one possibility is that frequency of dream recall will be linked to performance on visuomotor tasks such as the Mirror Tracing Task.