Dreamlike activities

Related states of awareness may be distinguished from the dream experiences typically reported; these include dreamlike states experienced as a person falls asleep and as he awakens, respectively called hypnagogic and hypnopompic reveries. During sleep itself there are nightmares, observable signs of sexual activity, and sleepwalking. Even people who ostensibly are awake may show evidence of such related phenomena as hallucinating, trance behaviour, and reactions to drugs.

Rapid eye movement is not characteristic of sleep onset; nevertheless, as people drift (as inferred from EEG activity) from wakefulness through drowsiness into sleep, they report dreamlike hypnagogic experiences about 90 percent of the time on being awakened. Most of these experiences (about 80 percent) are said to be visual. A person who awakens from drowsiness or at the onset of sleep will recall experiences that may be classified as dreams about 75 percent of the time. These “dreamlets” seem to differ from dream-associated REM sleep in being less emotional (neither pleasant nor unpleasant), more transient, and less elaborate. Such hypnagogic experiences seem to combine abstract thinking with recall of recent events (known in psychoanalytical terms as day residues). This is quite typical of falling asleep. Systematic studies remain to be made of the hypnopompic reveries commonly reported during mornings before full arousal, but it seems likely that they include recollections of the night’s dreams or represent one’s drifting back into transient REM sleep.

Extreme behavioral manifestations during sleep—night terrors, nightmares, sleepwalking, and enuresis (bedwetting)—have been found to be generally unrelated to ordinary dreaming. Night terrors are characterized by abrupt awakening, sometimes with a scream; a sleeping child may sit up in bed, apparently terror-stricken, with wide-open eyes and often with frozen posturing that may last several minutes. Afterward there typically is no recollection of dreamlike experience. Night terrors are observed in about 2 or 3 percent of children, and roughly half of the attacks occur between the ages of 4 and 7; about 10 percent of them are seen among youngsters as old as 12 to 14 years. Nightmares typically seem to be followed by awakening with feelings of suffocation and helplessness and expressions of fearful or threatening thoughts. Evidence of nightmares is observed for 5 to 10 percent of children, primarily about 8 to 10 years of age. Studies have suggested that signs of spontaneously generated night terrors and nightmares may be related to abrupt awakening from deep sleep that experimentally appears dreamless. This suggests that the vividly reported fears may well be produced by emotional disturbances that first occur on awakening.

Sleepwalking, observed in about 1 percent of children, predominantly appears between ages 11 and 14. Apparently sleeping individuals rise and walk from their beds, eyes open, usually avoiding obstacles, and later express no recollection of the episode. Studies of EEG data indicate that sleepwalking occurs only in deep sleep when dreams seem essentially absent; the behaviour remains to be reported for REM sleep. Enuresis occurs in about one-fourth of children over age four. These episodes seem not to be associated with REM as much as they do with deep sleep in the absence of D-state signs.

Nocturnal emission of sperm remains to be described in terms of any distinguishing EEG pattern; such events are extremely rare among sleeping laboratory subjects. Among a large sample of males who were interviewed about their sexual behaviour, about 85 percent reported having experienced emissions at some time in their lives, with typical frequency during the teens and 20s being about once a month. Of the females interviewed, 37 percent reported erotic dreams, sometimes with orgasm, averaging about three to four times a year. Most often, however, openly sexual dreams are said not to be accompanied by orgasm in either sex. Males usually could recall no dreams associated with emission, although most implicated erotic dreaming.

Dreamlike experiences induced by trances, delirium, or drug hallucination seem to stem from impairments to the central nervous system that lower the efficiency of processing sensory stimuli from the external environment. In such cases, apparently, one’s physiological activities begin to escape environmental constraint to the point that internalized, uncritical thinking and perceiving prevail.

Diverse views on the nature of dreams