Dreams emotions

When we speak of REM sleep activation of the limbic, paralimbic, and subthalamic brain—and ascribe such dream emotions as elation, anxiety, and anger to it—we may sound a bit Ercudian. When all is said and done, isn t this Ereud s id, getting stirred up in sleep and raising havoc with... 

What does seem clear from the new data is that dreaming is driven— strongly—by forebrain systems subserving primary emotions, and that these emotions, are potent shapers of dream plots. The activation of the amygdala, shown by PET studies, is entirely consonant with the phenomenological fact that anxiety is, by far, the leading dream emotion. But anxiety was not a wish for Freud. It was, instead, a symptom caused by... 

Recent studies of dream emotion prove Kliiver and Bucy s point. They support the idea that it is the brain itself—and more specifically the limbic brain—that may generate fear (the number one dream affect), cosmic elation (number two), and anger (number three). To round out the picture, there are reports that an intensification of these same emotions colors the dreams of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. Subjects may indeed evince rapid heart action, increases in blood pressure, and rises and falls of breathing efforts in REM sleep, but these are not sensed as part of the subjective experience of dream emotion. 

Although dream emotions are the same in men and women, they are associated with highly individual content. It is in this spirit that the interpretation of dreams - particular dreams of specific individuals - can still find a place in personal psychology and psychotherapy. In all likelihood, this is probably what has been going on in psychodynamic psychotherapy anyway. 

Repeated low-dose administration of OP compounds can produce symptoms and signs that are not seen after single exposures to the same doses. For example, subjects given dally injections of DFF reported the additional symptoms of insomnia, excessive dreaming, emotional lability. Increased libido, paresthesias, visual hallucinations, and tremor (90) and prolonged administration in animals induces sensorimotor neuropathy. 

Giddiness, tension, anxiety, jitteriness, restlessness, emotional lability, excessive dreaming, insomnia, nightmares, headaches, tremor, withdrawal and depression, bursts of slow waves of elevated voltage in EEC, especially on over-ventilation, drowsiness, difficult concentration, slowness on recall, confusion, slurred speech, ataxia, generalized weakness, coma, with absence of reflexes, Cheyne-Stokes respirations, convulsions, depression of respiratory and circulatory centers, with dyspnea, cyanosis, and fall in blood pressure. 

The sense of the peculiar was nearly palpable. Dark oceans of time and space seemed to swell and flow beneath our feet. The image of the earth hanging in space was everywhere emotionally superimposed on the situation around us. And what was that situation really I lay in my hammock, thrilled and uneasy at the edge of sleep, then I fell into deep sleep and deep dreams from which nothing remained in the morning save the sense of yawning interstellar space. 

Hypochondriac pain and distension, fullness in the chest, stomach and abdomen, irritability, depression and frustration, dream-disturbed sleep, irregular menstruation, a bitter taste in the mouth, dry mouth and throat, headache, vertigo, fatigue, reduced appetite, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, cold hands and fullness in the chest when subject to strong emotional disturbance. 

Schizophrenia is a devastating mental disorder characterized by abnormal thinking, psychosis (delusions, paranoia, hearing voices), lack of emotion, and loss of function in one s school or workplace. The bizarre thought patterns of schizophrenics often resemble that of dream content, and in fact it was once hypothesized that people with schizophrenia suffered from intrusions of REM sleep into wakefulness, much like that seen in people with narcolepsy. However, most scientific evidence suggests that this is not the case. 

In fact, normal dreaming is not all that ecstatic precisely because, there too, negative emotion is an unchained demon spoiler of our fantasized pleasure. Increasingly, the evidence from dream studies indicates that plot details are often designed to fit the directions of anxiety, fear, and anger rather than joy, elation, and erotic pleasure. 

Last night, for example, I was thrilled to experience the potent onrush of dreaming that often accompanies the reshifting of my sleep when I travel. After a sleepless first half-night, I began to dream intensively in the second half. In each of the three scenes I remember the emotion turned—or remained—painfully negative. 

Pharmacology and psychology are thus in a three-way interaction with physiology that determines the form of conscious experience. That form shapes and constrains its content. And much of this process appears to be due to chance. If positive emotions predominate, my dream or LSD trip will be psychedelic and possibly even ecstatic. If negative emotions prevail, my dream will be more or less nightmarish and my LSD trip more or less monstrous. 

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