New links between lucid dreaming and psychosis could revive dream therapy in psychiatry

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New links between lucid dreaming and psychosis could revive dream therapy in psychiatry

Similarities in brain activity during lucid dreaming and psychosis suggest that dream therapy may be useful in psychiatric treatment, a European Science Foundation (ESF) workshop has found. This is strengthened by the potential evolutionary relationship between dreams and psychosis.

Lucid dreaming - when you are aware you are dreaming - is a hybrid state between sleeping and being awake. It creates distinct patterns of electrical activity in the brain that have similarities to the patterns made by psychotic conditions such as schizophrenia. Confirming links between lucid dreaming and psychotic conditions offers potential for new therapeutic routes based on how healthy dreaming differs from the unstable states associated with neurological and psychiatric disorders .

New data affirms the connection by showing that while dreaming lucidly the brain is in a dissociated state, according to Ursula Voss from the University of Frankfurt in Germany. Dissociation involves losing conscious control over mental processes, such as logical thinking or emotional reaction . In some psychiatric conditions this state is also known to occur while people are awake.

"In the field of psychiatry, the interest in patients' dreams has progressively fallen out of both clinical practice and research. But this new work seems to show that we may be able to make comparisons between lucid dreaming and some psychiatric conditions that involve an abnormal dissociation of consciousness while awake, such as psychosis, depersonalisation and pseudoseizures." said the workshop's convenor Silvio Scarone, from the Università degli Studi di Milano in Milan, Italy.

Meanwhile, the previously discredited ...

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http://www.physorg.com/news168024914.html#