Research: Dream Therapy for Psychotics May Yield Results

Dream dissection -- the hard way

Here’s a cool story I ran across on a dream forum I’ve started visiting…

According to a recent article on  Science Daily, research suggests that a link between lucid dreaming and psychotic conditions — and scientists are hoping that further exploration of this link might point the way to more effective treatment.

Here’s an excerpt from the article…

Confirming links between lucid dreaming and psychotic conditions offers potential for new therapeutic routes based on how healthy dreaming differs from the unstable states associated with neurological and psychiatric disorders.

New data affirms the connection by showing that while dreaming lucidly the brain is in a dissociated state, according to Ursula Voss from the University of Frankfurt in Germany. Dissociation involves losing conscious control over mental processes, such as logical thinking or emotional reaction. In some psychiatric conditions this state is also known to occur while people are awake.

“In the field of psychiatry, the interest in patients’ dreams has progressively fallen out of both clinical practice and research. But this new work seems to show that we may be able to make comparisons between lucid dreaming and some psychiatric conditions that involve an abnormal dissociation of consciousness while awake, such as psychosis, depersonalisation and pseudoseizures.” said the workshop’s convenor Silvio Scarone, from the Università degli Studi di Milano in Milan, Italy.

To read the full article, click here.

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