Abstract
A long noted hypothesis is that mechanisms of dreaming play a role in psychotic hallucinations. One challenge for this hypothesis is that while psychotic hallucinations primarily are auditory, dreaming most characteristically is visual. At the same time, previous studies have not explicitly examined auditory impressions in dreaming. Here, we mapped the prevalence and characteristics of auditory impressions in 130 dreams reported after spontaneous awakenings from sleep in 13 normal, healthy people. We instructed participants to report any dream they could recall and to pay particular attention to possible auditory impressions. The participants reported auditory impressions in 93.9% of their dreams on average. The most prevalent auditory type was other people speaking (83.9% of participants' dreams), followed by the dreamer speaking (60.0%), and other types of sounds (e.g. music, 33.1%). Of altogether 407 instances of auditory impressions in the 130 dreams, auditory quality was judged comparable to waking in 46.4%, indeterminate in 50.6%, and absent or only thought-like in 2.9%. The results suggest that also internally generated auditory (verbal) sensations are a central component of dreaming, typically occurring several times every night in normal, healthy people.
Highlights
At least since the philosophers of ancient Greece, scholars have pointed out the analogy between madness and dreaming, portraying the psychotic person as a waking dreamer and the dream as a psychotic event [1, 2]
In the first study that examined the auditory domain in a direct and detailed manner, we found that each of 13 participants reported auditory impressions in the great majority ( 80%) of their dreams
Combined with the 93% that we identified when having our participants focus explicitly on this perceptual modality, we suggest that the great majority of recalled dreams do include auditory impressions
Summary
At least since the philosophers of ancient Greece, scholars have pointed out the analogy between madness (psychosis) and dreaming, portraying the psychotic person as a waking dreamer and the dream as a psychotic event [1, 2]. Researchers have pointed to similarities between dreaming and psychosis in neurophysiological underpinnings This includes activation of secondary perceptual association regions in the posterior cerebral cortex, which co-occur with the internally generated percepts in the two conditions [11,12,13,14]. The problem of underestimation would occur if people who are not explicitly instructed to attend to and report their auditory dream impressions, fail to do so even when such impressions take place. This type of methodological bias has been demonstrated for other dream elements, such as emotions [31]. By wanting to remedy and reopen this issue, we directly and extensively examined auditory impressions in naturalistic dreams, using explicit instructions for the participants to attend to and report the presence and qualities of any such impressions
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