The thematic continuity of mental sleep experience in the same night.

Abstract

It has been found that the contents of mental sleep experience (MSE) in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep are often interrelated. The aim of this study was to see whether this interrelatedness is better accounted for by the hypothesis that the mental sleep experience interrupted by provoked awakening is resumed when the subject returns to sleep (resumption), or by the hypothesis that the same contents are elaborated repeatedly throughout the night (iterative processing). We also aimed to gain some information as to the processes by which contents previously stored in memory are retrieved and inserted into the current MSE. Ten subjects were awakened 4 times on each of 4 nights after 9 min of REM sleep, and the contents of all the possible pairings of reports were scored and compared with respect to the factors "night" (same/different), "report continguity" (contiguous/noncontinguous reports), "unit interrelated" (lexical/propositional), and "interrelationship" (paradigmatic/syntagmatic). Both the occurrences and the frequencies of interrelations were greater for same night pairs than for different night pairs, but without significant differences between contiguous and noncontiguous pairs: these data provide support for the iterative processing hypothesis. The units interrelated in pairs of reports are more frequently at a lexical than a propositional level and show more paradigmatic than syntagmatic interrelationships: these data suggest that the reelaboration of contents of previous MSEs occurs mainly at a local level, making for the coherence, rather than the thematic, progression of the MSE narrative.