Is it true that color dreams dream only to schizophrenics?

Often you can find the opinion that if a person sees colored dreams, this indicates a predisposition to schizophrenia. On the day of the worldwide awareness of schizophrenia, we decided to check whether this statement is true.

Publications about such a relationship appeared in "Komsomolskaya Pravda", “Arguments and facts", Adme And "View". This question is also asked users "VKontakte", Facebook And "Yandex.Zen".

Schizophrenia is a polymorphic mental disorder. According to the latter dataHe is subject to up to 1% of the world's population. In Russia, according to official statistics, about half a million people with such a diagnosis. Schizophrenia Curses to disability more often than paralysis or dementia. In addition to the stereotypical manifestations of the disease, such as hallucinations and voices in the head, persistent disorders of fundamental thinking, as well as emotional reactions, are noted.

Somnology is the science of human sleep and dreams, located at the junction of medicine and neurobiology. It is considered a relative young discipline, the rapid development of which I had to In the second half of the 20th century. With the help of MRI and neuroscanners, scientists Get it Three -dimensional images of gray and white matter, and then analyze the activity of different areas of the brain. According to the latest scientific ideas, a dream is a comprehensive process of the night function of the brain that performs many vital functions. During sleep, a hormone of somatotropin is produced, cells responsible for immunity are activated, and the information received during the day is transferred from short -term memory to long -term. This happens during the phase of quick sleep - it is at this moment that the person sees dreams.

The first group of scientists to assign the purpose of tracking the connection between dreams and mental illnesses, I became The team under the leadership of Professor Bravin Stent at the University of Austin (USA). They selected a group of volunteers from 25 to 47 years old, some of which had an established diagnosis of schizophrenia, others had a risk of inheritance from close relatives, and the third included healthy subjects. According to them, people with a diagnosis or a high degree of probability of its development see color dreams 20 times more often than participants in the control group.

However, in the future, when other groups of scientists tried to repeat the experiment, they received by no means so impressive results. In 2007, Doctor of Medical Sciences Elena Korobbelnikova, having studied the base of Russians' dreams collected in ten years, Disputed The connection between colorful dreams and schizophrenia. Possible mental disorders, according to her, are more indicated by “unusual bright sensations - for example, smells, a feeling of cold or heat, unusual frightening images, negative emotions.” Somnologist Roman Buzunov agree With a colleague: “The perception of colors in a dream changes with different mental diseases. With schizophrenia, psychoses, dreams become brighter, and with depression, on the contrary, they "dull." But this does not mean at all that color dreams are the path to schizophrenia. ”

In 2012 Confirmed A group of scientists led by Professor Khazai. They chose 72 volunteers and divided them into four groups: people with a confirmed diagnosis of schizophrenia and medication compensated for at least four weeks, people with other mental illnesses, brothers and sisters of people with schizophrenia, people without mental illness. Researchers offered them a questionnaire of 14 parameters. Having processed the results, they came to the conclusion that only 61.1% of participants from the first group saw color dreams, while in the control group - 80%. 

At the same time, human dreams with psychotic symptoms are really different from the dreams of healthy people. In 2015 in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry appeared A study that demonstrates that people with mental illness 55% more often see at least one nightmare per week than mentally healthy people.

Thus, although colored dreams can dream of people with schizophrenia, in a healthy person they should not be an occasion to run to a specialist. But if someone began to suffer from regular nightmares, perhaps this alarming sign and the consultation of a professional will be useful.

Not true

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. Schizophrenia as the price of human evolution
2. Is there life when you have schizophrenia
3. How people live with schizophrenia live
4. Arnhild LaVaven. Tomorrow I have always been a lion