Dreams by Day and None at Night!

The video below shows the trailer of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4 Episode 17 called "Night Terrors". I highly recommend this entire season to any psychology and/or science fiction fans out there. This 4th season is a little different from the others as it is full of mind games, psychopathology and insanity, and touches on subjects such as the crossing of mental boundaries between "alien species". Even though the quality of this trailer is prehistoric and gives you a different impression, it still shows you a preview of the episode and helps me introduce the topic of psychosis.

This star trek episode starts with the ship Enterprise finding another ship that is in perfect shape where the whole crew of 34 people was murdered. As they investigate the problem, the crew on the Enterprise start to experience auditory and visual hallucinations (such as snakes, seeing people that aren’t there, seeing dead people getting up), paranoia and delusions. Also, including many instances of forgetfulness and confusion. Doctor Crusher and counselor Troi soon realize that the whole crew is moving towards the realms of psychosis. This episode, even though sometimes following obvious Hollywoodian styles, is still a good suspense and keeps you intrigued especially if you want to verify if the claims made in the episode are still relevant today.

Thus, the episode is called "Night Terrors" even though it does not explicitly show the phenomenon of night terrors. To clarify, night terrors often occur in children between 4 and 12 years old, (but can easily be experienced by anyone) and consist of sudden awakenings from sleep due to intense fear and panic even though nothing is remembered from the dream itself. Night terrors are different from nightmares since they occur specifically during Stage 4 or REM sleep, whereas nightmares are independent from the sleep cycle. I would suggest watching it before reading the next part in green.

Thus, the symptoms the crew exhibit are consistent with the progression of psychosis such as in schizophrenics, involving  forgetfulness, delusions leading to full blown paranoia and hallucinations. However, these symptoms can be temporary and not due to a specific disorder, but to the environment. A possible trigger for these symptoms when people use hallucinogens, they will then experience both visual and auditory hallucinations, but will also sometimes be subject to delusions, intense panic episodes and forgetfulness.

Also, in a study by Cohen et al. (2005) it has been observed that people with the Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) were also experiencing vivid dreams, illusions (e.g. mistaking objects), hallucinations and delusions. GBS patients also have sleep disturbances. We do not know if the syndrome itself is causing the symptoms or the sleep disturbances do. In any case, it was found that patients with GBS experiencing hallucinations would have significantly shorter periods of REM sleep in their sleep cycles than GBS experiencing no hallucinations and people without the syndrome. In this case, towards the end of the episode, the crew finally realizes that they are REM sleep deprived which causes these psychotic symptoms. Remember, the episode was based on theories already developed involving dreams and psychosis. However, I was still wondering if it was relevant today.  Thus, this previous recent finding still supports the idea that REM sleep deprivation is correlated with increased hallucinations confirming the claims of the episode of 1991. Thus, other examples of peered reviewed articles, one in 1962 by Ralph J. Berger and one in 2008 by Scarone et al., are both associating REM sleep (where dreams occurs) and psychosis. Thus, this shows how across time, even though we do not fully understand the processes involving dreams and psychosis, these two states of mind  are still closely related even decades later. This subject will be further discussed in future posts.

Finally, this episode first reminded me of the movie Solaris (2002) starring George Clooney based on the book with the same name by Stanislaw Lem (1961) and which I won't discuss here either, but highly recommend to anyone!!

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Guillain-Barré Syndrome. (n.d.). Encyclopedia of Medicine. Retrieved September 20, 2009, from Answers.com           Web site:http://www.answers.com/topic/guillain-barr-syndrome.

Night terror. (n.d.). Encyclopedia of Medicine. Retrieved September 20, 2009, from Answers.com Web site: http://www.answers.com/topic/night-terror.

Berger, Ralph J. (1962). Effects of sleep deprivation on behaviour, subsequent sleep, and dreaming. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 108, 457-465.

Cochen et al, (2005) Vivid dreams, hallucinations, psychosis and REM sleep in Guillain–Barré syndrome. Brain, 128, 2535–2545.

Scarone et al, (2008). The dream as a model for psychosis: an experimental approach using bizarreness as a cognitive marker. Schizophr Bull, 34(3), 515–522.