Recurrent Dreams

Abstract

The clinical observation that temporal lobe seizure content is, in given individuals, analogous to dream content suggests that further study of this seizure type may throw light on the mechanism of dreaming in general. Indeed, it has been postulated that seizure content and dream "depend on the same neuronal mechanism in the temporal cortex."⁹ It is the purpose of this paper to examine some relationships between recurrent dreams and temporal lobe seizures when these occur in the same individuals. The immediate impetus for this study was furnished by observation of a patient with a recurrent dream of many years duration; the dream eventually appeared episodically during the waking state and finally occurred as an "aura" to a grand-mal seizure. Other cases had previously been encountered in which the recurrent dreams assumed a different relationship to seizures. After a study of these personal cases and of