SLEEP
April 30, 2015
Michael Rak, P. Beitinger, Axel Steiger et al.
56 citations
People with narcolepsy recall dreams and nightmares significantly more often than healthy controls, and they also experience lucid dreaming—awareness of dreaming during a dream—at a much higher rate. Among 60 narcolepsy patients and 919 controls, narcolepsy patients reported roughly double the frequency of dream recall and nightmares, and their lucid dreaming frequency was about four times higher. Most narcolepsy patients who had experienced lucid dreaming said it helped relieve the distress from nightmares. Medication did not affect lucid dreaming frequency, though it did reduce dream recall and nightmare frequency.
Consciousness and cognition
September 1, 2020
Jarrod Gott, Michael Rak, Leonore Bovy et al.
23 citations
Lucid dreaming, where people experience waking-like self-reflection during dreams, is linked to more wake-like brain activity in the prefrontal cortex. This multi-centre study, combining four investigations, examined whether fragmented sleep increases the chance of lucid dreaming. Results showed that self-reported awakenings, polyphasic sleep schedules, and physiologically measured wake-REM sleep transitions were associated with lucid dreaming. However, neither self-assessed sleep quality nor physiologically measured numbers of awakenings showed an association. The findings suggest a nuanced relationship, where certain types of sleep fragmentation, but not all, may relate to lucid dreaming, and the authors discuss possible causal mechanisms.