Brain : a journal of neurology
July 1, 2019
Célia Lacaux, Charlotte Izabelle, Giulio Santantonio et al.
47 citations
People with narcolepsy, who enter REM sleep abnormally quickly and often experience lucid dreaming, show higher creativity than healthy controls. In a study of 185 narcolepsy patients and 126 controls, those with narcolepsy scored higher on the Test of Creative Profile (58.9 vs. 55.1) and the Creativity Achievement Questionnaire (10.4 vs. 6.4). Objective tests of creative performance in 30 patients and 30 controls also favored the narcolepsy group (4.3 vs. 3.7). Most narcolepsy symptoms—sleepiness, hypnagogic hallucinations, sleep paralysis, lucid dreaming, and REM sleep behavior disorder—were linked to higher creativity scores, suggesting that lifelong heightened REM sleep access may enhance creative potential.
Current biology : CB
June 22, 2020
Matthieu Koroma, Célia Lacaux, Thomas Andrillon et al.
34 citations
During REM sleep, the brain flexibly amplifies or suppresses external sounds depending on eye movements. Using EEG to reconstruct speech from brain responses in a multi-talker environment, meaningful speech was amplified over meaningless speech overall. However, at the precise moments of rapid eye movements, meaningful speech was selectively suppressed. This shows that eye movements during REM sleep act as a gate, selectively blocking informative external stimuli while allowing them at other times, resolving a long-standing debate about whether the sleeping brain processes or ignores the outside world.
May 16, 2023
William Wong, Kátia C. Andrade, Thomas Andrillon et al.
21 citations
preprint
A new open-access database, DREAM, combines sleep magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) recordings with standardized dream reports to enable large-scale neurocognitive research on dreaming. The initial release includes 20 datasets from 561 participants and 2649 awakenings, each with at least 20 seconds of high-frequency M/EEG data and a classification of the subject's experience. Analyses demonstrate that features extracted from EEG can predict whether a person reports having had a conscious experience during both REM and NREM sleep. The database aims to overcome the limitations of small sample sizes and methodological variability in dream research, allowing new questions to be addressed at a scale unattainable by individual labs.
Nature communications
August 13, 2025
William Wong, Rubén Herzog, Kátia Cristine Andrade et al.
10 citations
A new open database, the DREAM database, combines standardized sleep magneto/electroencephalography (M/EEG) recordings with dream reports from 505 participants across 20 datasets, totaling 2,643 awakenings. Each awakening includes at least 20 seconds of high-resolution sleep EEG (≥100 Hz, ≥2 electrodes) and a classification of the sleeper's reported experience. Analyses showed that reports of conscious experiences during sleep can be predicted from objective EEG features in both REM and NREM sleep. The database aims to overcome limitations of small sample sizes and methodological variability in dream research, enabling larger-scale investigations of the neurocognitive basis of dreaming.