Drugs and Dreams III: The Effects of Imipramine on the Dreams of Depressed Patients

Dreaming under antidepressants: A systematic review on evidence in depressive patients and healthy volunteers

“…45 These two studies had seven content rating scales in common but found different results: imipramine increased hostility per word of dream report in healthy volunteers only, 44 while the same substance increased heterosexuality contents and reduced anxiety only in depressive patients. 45 Depressive patients taking different tricyclic ADs reported a reduction of unpleasant feelings as well as a reduction of family members as compared to friends and strangers. 46 The rest of the content scales used in these four studies showed no significant differences under the studied tricyclic ADs.…”

An Approach to Understanding Dreams

“…This would further support that dreams may be seen as meaningful and that a search for meaning would be seen as a more reasonable undertaking shows systematic changes concomitant with improvement in their waking condition [18,19,27,34,35,36]. We compared small groups of mildly, moderately, and severely brain damaged subjects in the laboratory [32].…”

“…The emotional preoccupation of the dreamer (his immediate current concern) is the significant influence on the content of the subject's subsequent dreaming [32,36,41,48]; Piccione et al 1976). Dream content appears to be both stable and variable as night-to-night content correlation explains 21% of the variance [42].…”

“…We have shown that: (1) it is the more emotionally rated experience of the day that is found in the night's dream report [41]; (2) Judges can distinguish the reflections of significant immediate [32] and ongoing emotional events in dreams (the beginning and ending of the laboratory experience and the laboratory experience itself as an ongoing experience); (3) charged interpersonal experiences influence the content and reporting of the dream (e.g., the choice of the dream to be reported) [48]; the impact of the supervisory experience in psychotherapy [49] and the relationship in the laboratory of the dreamer to the dream collector [5]; (4) mood altering drugs change dream content [36]; (5) the mood regulatory function of sleep relates the change in the sleepy aspect of mood across the night to the amount of non-REM sleep the subject has had, while the change in the unhappy aspect mood is a function of who one dreams about [14,15]; and (6) the dream experience as it is occurring can be influenced by meaningful input, e.g., differential incorporation of known and unknown names [11,12,21,25].…”

Benzodiazepine-Induced Modifications of Dream Content: The Effect of Flunitrazepam

“…By comparison with placebo condition, fluni trazepam induced more unpleasantness, more verbal aggressivity, more physical aggressivity, and more sexuality in dreams. This increase of emotionally loaded contents can be related to a disinhibitory effect of this drug, and the possible involvement of dopaminergic or serotoninergic systems is discussed.There is some evidence that psychoactive substances modify dream con tents, although a relatively small number of studies have been devoted to this matter ( Whitman et al, 1961;Kramer et al, 1966Kramer et al, , 1968Morgan et al, 1970;Firth, 1974).Benzodiazepines constitute a class of compounds widely used for their anxiolytic and hypnotic activity. Flunitrazepam is a member of this class, acting at low doses as a strong hypnotic Oswald et al, 1973).…”