Dreams and Epilepsy
Elena Korabelnikova, PhD,
is a graduate of Moscow Medical University. She is a neurologist,
psychotherapist, and sleep expert. She works at the Neurological
Department of Moscow Medical Academy, and is Professor of the
Psychological Department of the Institute of Medical Social
Rehabilitation. She is the author of two books on sleep and
dreaming.
Abstract
Many researchers pay attention to
peculiarities of dream characters and plots of those patients who
suffer from epilepsy. A great number of works are devoted to
independence of dreams and epilepsy, which became a subject of
research at the beginning of the 19th century after Morel's
introduction of the latent epilepsy concept in 1860.
We
have examined 198 patients with epilepsy and 55 healthy subjects.
The multiple recordings of dreams were carried out by taping the
subjects dream reports right after morning awakening. The analysis
of dreams content was performed by the means of original scheme of
dream content analysis.
According to our research data the dreams of people suffering from
epilepsy are characterised by increasing frequency and changing
emotional colouring towards the predominance of unpleasant and
frightening dreams and also by more complicated changes of their
structure: change of colour perception (the predominance of visual
images of frightant unnaturally bright contrasting colours), the
breach of dream plot and logicality, a frequent display of
aggression and autoaggression, a change of environment perception
(an unusual shape, size, characteristics and location of objects)
and self-perception (the change of a body scheme, perception of
himself as another person or as an object), high frequency of
sensations of various modalities and vegetative manifestations,
dream stereotypes and repetitions of dreams.
We
have noticed that the most frequent sensation in such dreams in
this kind of dreams is connected with the body transference in
space (falling, swinging, flying, etc.). According to our
observations many patients have so called “seizure” dreams, in
which a person sees his seizure, and also some peculiarities of
dreams in which patients see neither people nor objects but only
some substance of a vague shape, having some definite color and
uttering unpleasant sounds.
Thus,
epileptical focus can both lead to epileptical seizure, and
disorganize mental function when a person is awake and
substantially disturb the mental activity in a dream by “imposing”
some peculiarities of dreams.
So,
it's not surprising that rather often some specific stereotype
dreams typical for epilepsy occur long before objective clinical
manifestations and can serve as an important marker of brain
epileptisation.
