Narcolepsy is a neurological disorder characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness, sleep paralysis, and hallucinations. In addition, narcolepsy patients sometimes have difficulties identifying the boundary between dream and reality. But it’s not all bad news for narcoleptics, they are also more likely to experience lucid dreams (LD) and have creative abilities.
A group of scientists from Italy studied the influence of the coronavirus pandemic on sleep, while conducting a comparative analysis of narcoleptic patients with a control group of healthy people. During the pandemic, people generally reported changes in sleep patterns, increased frequency of remembered dreams, and an increase in the number of nightmares (including those related to the coronavirus). However, when comparing narcoleptic patients with healthy respondents, the researchers noted that narcoleptic patients were more likely to experience lucid dreams.
The authors then divided lucid dreamers into “low lucid dreamers” and “high lucid dreamers”. The first group experienced LD no more than 2/3 times a month, the second, from one to several times a week. The “high lucid dreamers” were more likely to record dreams and noted more dreams that influenced creativity or helped solve daytime problems.
A direct link between narcolepsy, creativity, lucid dreaming, and the pandemic has not yet been confirmed. But the authors suggest that through LD, the narcoleptic participants developed a strategy to counteract the negative content of dreams (which increased in instance during the pandemic period), noting that awareness helps fight off nightmares.
The authors did, however, add that it is too early to draw final conclusions from their work, because of the small sample, among other reasons. Narcolepsy is a rare disease (affecting 0.02–0.06% of adults), and as such, the researchers found only 43 sufferers to participate in their study (as well as 86 healthy participants).
The article was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology in May 2021.
