Dreaming during REM sleep: autobiographically meaningful or a simple reflection of a Hebbian-based memory consolidation process?

Dreaming during REM sleep: autobiographically meaningful or a simple reflection of a Hebbian-based memory consolidation process? Arch Ital Biol. 2018 Sep 01;156(3):99-111 Authors: Voss U, Klimke A Abstract REM sleep is a state of desynchronized electrophysiological activity of the brain. It is usually accompanied by mental activity characterized by a succession of complex visual experiences commonly referred to as dreaming. Although REM sleep and dreaming are not implicitly conjoined, when they co-occur, they have a very distinct phenomenology, as, typically, the dream plot is bizarre and incohesive which is mirrored in heightened brain activation coupled with strongly attenuated coherence levels. At the same time, owing to increased limbic system activity, REM sleep dreams are highly emotional. Moreover, concrete emotions are often unrelated to dream events. Nevertheless, REM sleep dreams are often subjectively perceived as story-like and autobiographically meaningful. Indeed, elements of salient life events, attachment figures, and personally relevant emotions, especially trauma, seem to have a higher probability of re-appearing in dreams, albeit the dream plot itself remains highly distorted. This has prompted several theories on the interpretability of dreams, some authors leaning towards dreams reflecting waking mentation, others suggesting complete dissociation between waking and dreaming, both sides not fully accounting for em...
Source: Archives Italiennes de Biologie - Category: Neuroscience Tags: Arch Ital Biol Source Type: research