REM and NREM Differences and Interactions in Production of Emotional Content
This project will perform awakenings from the REM state and from stage 2 NREM from 45 subjects. Upon awakening, subjects will be asked to describe whatever mentation they were experiencing.
Early reports of content differences between REM and NREM suggested that REM dreams were more emotional than NREM dreams. NREM dreams were characterized as being less vivid and more thought-like than REM dreams. Strauch and Meier (1996, p. 138) comment that in their dream series, “barely every second NREM dream featured the dream self emotionally related to the dream situation, whereas four out of every five REM dreams involved the dreamer emotionally in its events.”
Several authors in the psychoanalytic tradition (Trosman, Rechtschaffen, Offenkrantz, and Wolpert, 1960; French & Fromme, 1964) suggested that dreams at the beginning of the night (we now know that these would be NREM dreams) would announce an emotional wish or emotional conflict that dreams later in the night would pick up and work with in an attempt to contain or resolve the emotional conflict.
Offenkrantz and Rechtschaffen (1963) studied the sequential sleep patterns and dreams of a patient in psychotherapy for 15 consecutive nights. They noted that scenes from childhood memories never occurred early in the night but did occur on 8 of the 15 nights in dreams late in the night, after 4:30 a.m. They also noted that all the dreams of a night tended to be concerned with the same emotional conflict or a small number of such conflicts. They also claimed that they found evidence that the organization of a particular dream depended on the results of the dream work of the preceding dream, such that dream wishes required less and less disguise as the night progressed. NREM dreams were not examined.
Rechtschaffen et al. (1963) studied sequential NREM-REM dreams within a single night in three subjects who had previously demonstrated good dream recall from NREM sleep. They restricted themselves to noting only obvious connections between dreams in sequence rather than analyzing “latent” content or asking for the dreamer’s associations to his or her dreams. They found repeated instances of dream elements recurring throughout the dream sequence. For example, the image of a street corner appeared in the first NREM dream of the night. It later appeared as the place where the dreamer met a girl. Other repeating elements noted in dream sequences of other subjects included: riding a bicycle, looking at a photograph, attending an outing, picnic, or camping trip, taking exams, sensing a sunny day, and so on. These elements, settings, or themes recurred throughout dream sequences and often framed emotional encounters in later dream images.
Kramer (1993) reported that selected emotional content variables showed statistically significant change across the night’s dreams and were predictive of mood improvement in the morning. These content variables involved change in the number and variety of characters in dreams across a single night of dreaming. Self-reported mood upon awakening in the morning was related to the increase in number of characters in dreams across the night. The latter increase may reflect an increase in REM density measures across the night.
We conclude that 1) sleep mentation can incorporate both specific images and loosely associated images and themes from emotional events in waking life; 2) the form of this incorporation may, in some cases, follow rule-governed procedures for representation of emotional content (e.g., male strangers representing emotional threat/danger); and 3) incorporation or lack of incorporation of emotional stresses and events can predict the individual’s long term waking response to the emotional stress or to trauma. Conclusion #2 is consistent with the hypothesis that incorporation of memory images in dreams actually facilitates processing and formation of long-term emotional memory, though this hypothesis, of course, needs to be tested experimentally before any firm conclusions can be adopted.
