Lucid dreams: their advantage and disadvantage in the frame of search activity concept.

Search activity (SA) is the behavioral and mental activity that is oriented to changes of the environment or of the subject's view and approach to the environment according to personal needs without the definite probability forecast of the outcomes of such activity, but with a regular consideration of the outcomes in the process of active behavior. Dream's lucidity (the subject's realization that he/she is dreaming) protects dreamer from awakenings during emotionally disturbing or frustrating dreams, because lucid dreams allow subject to feel separated from the dream events that may cause a feeling of helplessness. Due to such a protection from awakenings that can bring subject back to the frustration in wakefulness, subject can turn in the further sleep to normal non-lucid dreams that are restoring subject's SA in the subsequent wakefulness (activity in the uncertain situation with the feedback between behavior and its outcome). It is the advantage of lucid dreams. Their disadvantage is that due to the separation from the dream events that are in lucid dreams accepted as rationalized dreams, not as real stories where the dreamer acts like in wakefulness, their ability to restore SA is decreased until they are not displaced by the normal non-lucid dreams accepted as real stories.

The peculiarity of the right-hemisphere function in depression: solving the paradoxes.

Depression is characterized by functional insufficiency of the right hemisphere combined with its physiological overactivation. This paradox can be solved in the frame of the general concept of brain laterality. According to the present assumption, the left hemisphere organizes any information in an unambiguous monosemantic context, and this process requires an additional activation of the brain cortex in order to restrict natural relationships between objects and events. On the contrary, the right hemisphere organizes any information in the polysemantic context based on the simultaneous capture of the numerous natural relationships between elements of information. In healthy creative subjects this process does not require additional physiological activation of the cortex. In depression the physiological overactivation of the right hemisphere reflects the unsuccessful effort to overcome its functional insufficiency.

Dream content of schizophrenic, nonschizophrenic mentally ill, and community control adolescents.

This study compared the manifest dream content of 20 schizophrenic adolescent inpatients whose medications were stable for at least four weeks, 21 adolescent inpatients with other mental disorders (nonschizophrenic group) matched for age and gender, and 31 matched community controls. All participants were administered the standardized Formal Dream Content Rating Scale (FDCRS), which evaluates dream-related anxiety, cognitive disturbance, implausibility, involvement, primitivity, and recall, as well as two additional scales measuring emotional expression and duration of dream report. The Positive and Negative Symptoms Scale (PANSS) was administered to the two inpatient groups. The community controls demonstrated more involvement and emotional expression than the schizophrenic patients; furthermore, they demonstrated more implausibility and had a greater duration of dream report compared with the nonschizophrenic group. In the schizophrenic patients only, elevated scores on the negative subscale of the PANSS were significantly correlated with lower scores on involvement, emotional expression, and dream recall. No relationship was found between the positive subscale of the PANSS and any of the FDCRS subscales. These results suggest that psychopathology per se, rather than the specific psychiatric disturbance, may be associated with impoverishment of dream content, and that negative, rather than positive, schizophrenic symptomatology may be influential in the dream content of schizophrenic youngsters.

REM sleep latency and wakefulness in the first sleep cycle as markers of major depression: a controlled study vs. schizophrenia and normal controls.

INTRODUCTION: REM sleep latency is a clinically significant sleep variable that is found to be decreased in several psychiatric disorders. However, it is not known whether alteration of REM sleep latency is similar across disorders. In order to test whether incorporation of wakefulness in the first sleep cycle has a different outcome on REM sleep latency in different clinical groups, the authors have investigated correlation between sleep variables in the first sleep cycle in 25 patients with major depression, 24 patients with chronic schizophrenia, and in 10 healthy subjects. RESULTS: REM sleep latency correlates with the duration of wakefulness in the first cycle in patients suffering from chronic schizophrenia and in healthy subjects. This correlation does not hold true in patients suffering from major depression. CONCLUSION: Wakefulness incorporated in the first cycle influences REM sleep latency in healthy subjects and in patients suffering from chronic schizophrenia but not in patients suffering from major depression. This finding further supports the evidence that reduced REM sleep latency is a nonflexible marker of depression.