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Objective: Lucid dreaming is defined as a rare but robust awareness while dreaming and awareness of not real awake in that dreaming state. Although it is widely accepted as a REM sleep phenomenon, it may also exist during NREM sleep. Lucid dreaming might be a hybrid state between non-lucid dreaming and wakefulness that is proposed as an intermediate stage between psychotic like non-lucid dreaming and non-psychotic wakefulness. The prevalence of lucid dreaming in healthy population has been informed between 26-51% in several countries (Rolim et al., 2013). However, there is no lucid dreaming study in psychiatry outpatient clinics. Thus, we aimed to investigate the lucid dreaming features with a questionnaire based design in outpatients who applied to psychiatry clinics.
Methods: There are 74 patients (male: 23, female 51) whose average age was 32.48±8.69 years. Twenty one (28.4%) out patients had some lucid dreaming features while the rest were non-lucid dreaming (n=53, 71.6%) according to lucid dreaming questionnaire.
Results: The diagnoses in patients were as followings: depression (n=18, 24.7%), any anxiety disorder (n=35, 47.9%) and others (n=20, 27.4%). In this study, for the first time, we investigated the phenomenology of lucid dreaming in psychiatric outpatients.
Conclusion: Namely, patients have some features as insight, thought control and dissociation in lucid dreaming which may help our understandings of nightmares, dissociation, impaired insight in patients who are psychiatrically ill.