Solms, Mark

Solms, Mark. The Neuropsychology of Dreams. Mahwah, NJ Lawrence Erl-baum Associates, Inc., 1997. 

As Mark Solms points out in his recent book, the dreams of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy are more intense than those of normals. They are more frequently intensely unpleasant or nightmarish, and this is presumably a function of higher levels of anxiety mediated by the hyperexcit-able amygdala of the epileptic patients. These hypotheses are testable in two ways. One is to confirm the anecdotal reports of patients by studying the subjects in sleep labs, as Jose Calvo and his group have done in Mexico City. Compared to age- and sex-matched controls, the epileptic subjects had measurably higher levels of anxiety in their dream reports. 

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