A 31-year-old male psychiatric patient presented with an unusual multifaceted delusion of misidentification including Capgras syndrome, in which people in the immediate environment, the other patients and hospital staff, were seen as hired actors in a stage production. The genesis and reinforcement of his delusional thinking appears to be the results of psychological, organic, and ecological factors.
As a follow-up from a previous study, four subjects taking a 6-week French language immersion program maintained a dream diary starting 2 weeks before until 2 weeks after the course. They also slept in the laboratory during four series of nights: one before the course, two during the course and one after the course. Confirming previous observations, it was observed that those subjects who made significant progress in French learning, experienced French incorporations into dreams earlier and had more verbal communication in their dreams during the language training than those who made little progress. Combining these results with those of the earlier study revealed significant positive correlations between language learning efficiency and both increases in REM sleep percentages, and verbal communication in dreams, as well as a negative correlation with latency to the first French incorporation in dreams. These results support the notion that REM sleep and dreaming are related to waking cognitive processes.
The failure of dream psychology to delineate clear, consistent and interesting correlates of dream recall presents serious difficulties for the claim that dream recall is functionally significant. The present study examined the relation of six indices of boundary functioning and four measures of life affect to the consistency and frequency of dream recall in 373 young adults. Factor analysis indicated that consistency and frequency of dream recall were unrelated to global measures of boundary functioning, stress, depression, hassles and uplifts. On the assumption that the correlates of dream recall might be specific rather than global, 34 items from our expanded boundary questionnaire having significant zero order correlations with the frequency of dream recall were factor analyzed separately for consistent and inconsistent recallers. The two factors in each analysis were quite similar. Factor one was called the Imagination, factor two, Illusion. Among consistent recallers, dream recall and a group of items called "tough mindedness" loaded on the Imagination factor. For inconsistent recallers similar variables loaded on the Illusion factor. For all subjects, dream recall and tough mindedness were linked whether associated with Imagination or Illusion. The Imagination factor is creative and linked to dream recall for consistent recallers. Their illusion factor is frightening. For inconsistent recallers, the Illusion factor is linked to dreaming and is not frightening, and their Imagination factor is not creative. The stability-instability of dream generation and recall over time apparently results in the association of the dream recall tough-mindedness group of items with either the Imagination or Illusion factors.
