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Dreaming and Psychopathology:Dream Recall
and Dream Content of Psychiatric Inpatients
Michael Schredl, Ph.D.and Hildegard Engelhardt, Ph.D.
The present study investigated dream recall frequency and dream content of psychiatric
inpatients in comparison with healthy controls and in relation to waking psychopathology.
Patients �dream recall frequency was related to low sleep quality,frequent nocturnal awak-
enings and thin boundaries and did not differ substantially from that of healthy controls if
methodological issues are taken into account.Dream content seems to reflect waking-life
symptoms,e.g.,dreams of depressed patients showed themes of depression more often.
The results of our approach,in which we measured waking symptoms psychometrically
and correlated these measures with dream content rating scales,indicate that the diag-
nostic classification is probably not related to dream content primarily but rather the sever-
ity of the specific symptoms such as depressive mood or psychotic symptomatology.In
addition,specific dream themes may be related to severity of symptoms within a diagnos-
tic subgroup (e.g.,death themes in depressed patients).Future studies should investigate
these relationships in a longitudinal design and include other variables such as personali-
ty,cognitive measures and motivation since these factors may affect dream recall as well
as dream content in patients and may help to explain the differences in dream variables
between patients and healthy controls.(Sleep and Hypnosis 2001;3(1):44-54)
| Keywords: dream recall, dream content, psychopathology, depression, schizophrenia |
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