Walking dreams in congenital and acquired paraplegia |
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| Authors: | Saurat Marie-Thérèse Agbakou Maité Attigui Patricia Golmard Jean-Louis Arnulf Isabelle |
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| Institution: | aSleep Disorders Unit, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris, France;bDepartment of Psychology, Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense University, Paris, France;cDepartment of Biostatistics, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, ER4, Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, France;dINSERM U975, Paris, France;eCentre de Recherche de l’Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière – Pierre and Marie Curie University – UMR_S 975-CNRS UMR 722, France |
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| Abstract: | To test if dreams contain remote or never-experienced motor skills, we collected during 6 weeks dream reports from 15 paraplegics and 15 healthy subjects. In 9/10 subjects with spinal cord injury and in 5/5 with congenital paraplegia, voluntary leg movements were reported during dream, including feelings of walking (46%), running (8.6%), dancing (8%), standing up (6.3%), bicycling (6.3%), and practicing sports (skiing, playing basketball, swimming). Paraplegia patients experienced walking dreams (38.2%) just as often as controls (28.7%). There was no correlation between the frequency of walking dreams and the duration of paraplegia. In contrast, patients were rarely paraplegic in dreams. Subjects who had never walked or stopped walking 4–64 years prior to this study still experience walking in their dreams, suggesting that a cerebral walking program, either genetic or more probably developed via mirror neurons (activated when observing others performing an action) is reactivated during sleep. |
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| Keywords: | Paraplegia Dream Mirror neurons Walk Congenital palsy Spinal cord injury Continuity hypothesis |
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