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Psychosomatic Medicine 29:284-292 (1967)
© 1967 American Psychosomatic Society

Dream Scintillations

MARDI J. HOROWITZ M.D.1, JOHN E. ADAMS M.D.1, and BURTON RUTKIN M.S.E.E.1

1 Mount Zion Hospital and Medical Center, and the Department of Psychiatry and Division of Neurological Surgery, University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco, Calif.

In 1949 and in 1965 unusual subjective experiences were described as "dream scintillations." These experiences occur during wakefulness and include rapid successions of imagery which are hard to remember. The present report adds introspective data and emphasizes that the visual images of such occurrences have a quality, rhythm, and organization different from those of hypnagogic reverie or dreams. Similar events were not frequent in dream-deprivation experiments but did occur during experimental stimulation of the brain. Psychologically such events are seen as a form of derailment of thought from verbal to pictorial cognition, and a theoretical consideration of pictorial cognition is presented. Neurophysiologically, the phenomenon bears sufficient resemblance to occurrences in persons with temporal-lobe seizures that it might be considered a minor variant or forme fruste of temporal-lobe epilepsy triggered by metabolic fatigue or local circulatory factors.

Submitted on May 2, 1966






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Copyright © 1967 by the American Psychosomatic Society