Scarpelli Serena, Bartolacci Chiara, D'Atri Aurora, Gorgoni Maurizio, De Gennaro Luigi
Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy.
Front Psychol. 2019 Mar 15;10:459. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00459. eCollection 2019.
Dream experience (DE) represents a fascinating condition linked to emotional processes and the human inner world. Although the overlap between REM sleep and dreaming has been overcome, several studies point out that emotional and perceptually vivid contents are more frequent when reported upon awakenings from this sleep stage. Actually, it is well-known that REM sleep plays a pivotal role in the processing of salient and emotional waking-life experiences, strongly contributing to the emotional memory consolidation. In this vein, we highlighted that, to some extent, neuroimaging studies showed that the processes that regulate dreaming and emotional salience in sleep mentation share similar neural substrates of those controlling emotions during wakefulness. Furthermore, the research on EEG correlates of the presence/absence of DE and the results on EEG pattern related to the incorporated memories converged to assign a crucial role of REM theta oscillations in emotional re-processing. In particular, the theta activity is involved in memory processes during REM sleep as well as during the waking state, in line with the continuity hypothesis. Also, the gamma activity seems to be related to emotional processes and dream recall as well as to lucid dreams. Interestingly, similar EEG correlates of DE have been found in clinical samples when nightmares or dreams occur. Research on clinical samples revealed that promoting the rehearsal of frightening contents aimed to change them is a promising method to treat nightmares, and that lucid dreams are associated with an attenuation of nightmares. In this view, DE can defuse emotional traumatic memories when the emotional regulation and the fear extinction mechanisms are compromised by traumatic and frightening events. Finally, dreams could represent a sort of simulation of reality, providing the possibility to create a new scenario with emotional mastery elements to cope with dysphoric items included in nightmares. In addition, it could be hypothesized that the insertion of bizarre items besides traumatic memories might be functional to "impoverish" the negative charge of the experiences.
梦境体验（DE）代表了一种与情感过程和人类内心世界相关的迷人状态。尽管快速眼动睡眠（REM）与做梦之间的重叠已被克服，但多项研究指出，当从这个睡眠阶段醒来后进行报告时，情感和感知生动的内容更为常见。实际上，众所周知，REM睡眠在处理突出的情感清醒生活经历中起着关键作用，对情感记忆巩固有很大贡献。在这方面，我们强调，在某种程度上，神经影像学研究表明，调节睡眠思维中做梦和情感突出性的过程与清醒时控制情绪的过程共享相似的神经基质。此外，关于DE存在与否的脑电图相关性研究以及与纳入记忆相关的脑电图模式结果都表明，REM θ振荡在情感再处理中起着关键作用。特别是，θ活动在REM睡眠期间以及清醒状态下都参与记忆过程，这与连续性假说一致。而且，γ活动似乎与情感过程、梦境回忆以及清醒梦有关。有趣的是，在临床样本中出现噩梦或梦境时也发现了类似的DE脑电图相关性。对临床样本的研究表明，促进对可怕内容的排练以改变它们是治疗噩梦的一种有前景的方法，并且清醒梦与噩梦的减轻有关。从这个角度来看，当情感调节和恐惧消退机制因创伤性和可怕事件而受损时，DE可以化解情感创伤性记忆。最后，梦境可能代表一种现实模拟，提供了创造一个带有情感掌控元素的新场景以应对噩梦中包含的烦躁不安项目的可能性。此外，可以假设除了创伤性记忆之外插入奇异项目可能有助于“减少”经历的负面电荷。
