The phantom limb in dreams.
- Brugger P Neuropsychology Unit, Department of Neurology, University Hospital Zurich, Frauenklinikstrasses 26, CH-8091 Zurich, Switzerland. peter.brugger@usz.ch
- 2008-03-04
Published in:
- Consciousness and cognition. - 2008
Adaptation, Psychological
Agnosia
Body Image
Central Nervous System
Dreams
Ectromelia
Humans
Paraplegia
Phantom Limb
English
Mulder and colleagues [Mulder, T., Hochstenbach, J., Dijkstra, P. U., Geertzen, J. H. B. (2008). Born to adapt, but not in your dreams. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 1266-1271.] report that a majority of amputees continue to experience a normally-limbed body during their night dreams. They interprete this observation as a failure of the body schema to adapt to the new body shape. The present note does not question this interpretation, but points to the already existing literature on the phenomenology of the phantom limb in dreams. A summary of published investigations is complemented by a note on phantom phenomena in the dreams of paraplegic patients and persons born without a limb. Integration of the available data allows the recommendation for prospective studies to consider dream content in more detail. For instance, "adaptation" to the loss of a limb can also manifest itself by seeing oneself surrounded by amputees. Such projective types of anosognosia ("transitivism") in nocturnal dreams should also be experimentally induced in normally-limbed individuals, and some relevant techniques are mentioned.
- Language
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- English
- Open access status
- green
- Identifiers
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- DOI 10.1016/j.concog.2008.01.005
- PMID 18313942
- Persistent URL
- https://sonar.ch/global/documents/14334
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