特定主题的梦，是某些疾病的早期预警？｜科学60秒

Gary Stix: For Science, Quickly, I'm Gary Stix.

Dreams may say something about the psyche, but they also say something about disease states. Dreams may even be something we can take some control over. To find out about all this, Scientific American got in touch with sleep expert Isabelle Arnulf, who is head of the Sleep Disorders Clinic at Pitié Salpêtrière University Hospital in Paris.

During her career, Arnulf, who is also a professor of neurology at Sorbonne University in France, has researched a broad range of sleep conditions. Sleepwalking, rapid eye movement, sleep behavior disorder, lucid dreaming, sleep and Parkinson's disease and hypersomnia, hypersomnia being excessive daytime sleepiness. Professor Arnulf is with us now to talk about sleep and dreams.

Hello, Professor Arnulf. Welcome to the podcast.

Isabelle Arnulf: Hello. Thank you.

Stix: So REM Sleep Behavior Disorder has been a real focus of your research. Can you tell us what that is and how you've found that it interacts with dreams and also how it might help us to better understand dreams?

Arnulf: So REM sleep behavioral disorders correspond to people having some violent behaviors during sleep, including boxing, kicking, shouting. This is the most common kind of dream behavior we see. And this is a disorder that should be treated because people are injuring themselves or their loved one. Most of them are older than 50 years old and they can go up to 80.

So it's not young people. And it has been discovered in the last 15 years that these behaviors, when they occurred in the elderly, is a strong predictor of Parkinson's disease and related disorders. So we started to do a lot of cohort of patients to follow them over time and looked whether they would develop Parkinson's disease or not.

This is the main research direction presently, but in addition to that was to use these behaviors as a window onto the dream process. Because if you think about it, during this process of waking up and remembering your dream, you lose a lot of information. In contrast, if you look at people during REM sleep behavior disorder, you'll see that dream in action at the time it's happening. People speak exactly like they would speak during wakefulness. They behave like they would during wakefulness. It's a narrow window, but it's a very, very proficient window into dreams.

Stix: Is there certain content of these dreams? And my understanding is that in some of the neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson's that you just mentioned, there are certain themes, there's certain types of dreams that they have. Can you talk about them?

Arnulf: The most recurring themes of these dreams are aggression. They are mostly aggressed by animals, or by other humans. Or it's their loved ones who were aggressed, and they fight back to protect their loved ones, to protect themselves. We see that in 80% of the dreams, but 20% of them are quite normal.

Stix: Can this be used by clinicians for diagnosis?

Arnulf: If somebody is...[full transcript]