Dream-enacting behavior is widespread in hale and hearty young adults

December 5, 2009 - 12:58 pm | 60 views

Technology.am (Dec. 05, 2009) — A latest study in the journal Sleep shows that dream-enacting behaviors are widespread in hale and hearty young adults, and the occurrence of precise behaviors differs among men and women.

lady-dreams Results point out that 98 percent of subjects (486/495) reported experiencing one of seven subtypes of dream-enacting behavior as a minimum “rarely” in the previous year. The most rampant behavior subtype was “fear,” with 93 percent reporting that they had felt signs of fear in their body after awakening from a scary dream. Seventy-eight percent reported that they got up from an erotic dream to discover that they were sexually aroused; 72 percent had awakened from a joyful dream to find that they were really smiling or laughing. every of the other four behavior subtypes was reported by over 50 percent of participants: They awakened from a dream to discover that they were talking, crying, acting out an angry or suspicious behavior such as punching or kicking, or acting out other movements for example waving or pointing. Women reported more speaking, crying, fear and smiling/laughing than men, and men reported more sexual arousal.

Lead author and co-investigator Tore Nielsen, PhD, professor of psychiatry at the Université de Montreal in Canada, was astonished by the high commonness of dream-enacting behavior. Nielsen noted that more studies will require to be conducted to form a difference among normal dream-enacting behavior and actions that are related with REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD), which is characterized by anomalous behaviors rising all through rapid eye movement (REM) sleep that cause injury or sleep disruption.

“Normal episodes are generally very mild, for example, temporarily jerking an arm or leg while waking up from a nightmare, once or twice a year,” said Nielsen. “This is far dissimilar from RBD cases, which are naturally very deep, and may engage frequently flailing an arm or a leg or smashing into something in the middle of a dream, not waking up effortlessly from it, with occurrences numerous times a month.”

A total of 1,140 first-year undergraduate students who were enrolled in preliminary psychology courses willingly participated in the study. About two-thirds were female. Participants concluded numerous questionnaires relating to personality and dreaming.

To decide the kind of questions that are most excellent for eliciting reports of dream-enacting behavior, students were separated into three groups. Group one (mean age 19.9 years) was provided with general questions relating to dream-enacting behaviors, group two (mean age 20.1 years) received the similar questions with examples, and group three (mean age 19.1 years) received questions relating definite behavior subtypes. The occurrence of dream-enacting behavior augmented with growing question specificity (35.9 percent in group one, 76.7 percent in group two and 98.2 percent in group three).

The study distinguished the dream-enacting behavior of speaking out loud a few of the words of a dream in relation to talking from somniloquy (sleep talking), which was defined as speaking or making sounds in sleep with no clear recall of an associated dream..

The authors contemplate that there is a likelihood of a personality characteristic involvement and a hereditarily strong-minded tendency for recurrent dream-enacting behaviors. It remains unidentified whether the dream-enacting behaviors of healthy subjects might foresee future RBD symptoms.

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