ArticleHuman brain mapping2020
Fear in dreams and in wakefulness: Evidence for day/night affective homeostasis.
Article in Human brain mapping, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed.
- Re-experiencing trauma: Occipital lobe resting-state functional connectivity in posttraumatic stress disorder.Psychiatry research. Neuroimaging · 2026Article
- Disturbing dreams and dementia incidence across diverse cohort studies: A COSMIC collaboration study.Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences · 2026Article
- The cathartic dream: Using a large language model to study a new type of functional dream in healthy and clinical populations.Journal of sleep research · 2025Article
- The Future of Parasomnias.Journal of sleep research · 2025Review
- Dreaming conundrum.Journal of sleep research · 2025Review
- REM refines and rescues memory representations: a new theory.Sleep advances : a journal of the Sleep Research Society · 2025Review
- We are the Sensors of Consciousness! A Review and Analysis on How Awakenings During Sleep Influence Dream Recall.Nature and science of sleep · 2025Article
- The new science of sleep: From cells to large-scale societies.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Review
- Consciousness and sleep.Neuron · 2024Review
- Evidence of an active role of dreaming in emotional memory processing shows that we dream to forget.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Dreaming in Bipolar Disorders - Feasibility of the Central Image Method: A Prospective Controlled Trial.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Evidence for an emotional adaptive function of dreams: a cross-cultural study.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Dreaming during the COVID-19 pandemic: Support for the threat simulation function of dreams.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- What about dreams? State of the art and open questions.Journal of sleep research · 2022Review
- Dreaming during the COVID-19 pandemic: A narrative review.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2022Review
- Distressing dreams and risk of Parkinson's disease: A population-based cohort study.EClinicalMedicine · 2022Article
- Commentary on the paper "The heartbeat evoked potential is a questionable biomarker in nightmare disorder: A replication study. By Bogdany, T., Perakakis, P., Bodizs, R., Simor, P., 2021. Neuroimage Clin 33, 102933".NeuroImage. Clinical · 2022Article
- Brain reactivity to emotion persists in NREM sleep and is associated with individual dream recall.Cerebral cortex communications · 2022Article
- Targeted Memory Reactivation During REM Sleep in Patients With Social Anxiety Disorder.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Recent neuroscientific theories have proposed that emotions experienced in dreams contribute to the resolution of emotional distress and preparation for future affective reactions. We addressed one emerging prediction, namely that experiencing fear in dreams is associated with more adapted responses to threatening signals during wakefulness. Using a stepwise approach across two studies, we identified brain regions activated when experiencing fear in dreams and showed that frightening dreams modulated the response of these same regions to threatening stimuli during wakefulness. Specifically, in Study 1, we performed serial awakenings in 18 participants recorded throughout the night with high-density electroencephalography (EEG) and asked them whether they experienced any fear in their dreams. Insula and midcingulate cortex activity increased for dreams containing fear. In Study 2, we tested 89 participants and found that those reporting higher incidence of fear in their dreams showed reduced emotional arousal and fMRI response to fear-eliciting stimuli in the insula, amygdala and midcingulate cortex, while awake. Consistent with better emotion regulation processes, the same participants displayed increased medial prefrontal cortex activity. These findings support that emotions in dreams and wakefulness engage similar neural substrates, and substantiate a link between emotional processes occurring during sleep and emotional brain functions during wakefulness.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.