Kasatkin: Characteristics of Prodomal Dreams

from Van de Castle’s Our Dreaming Mind (page 363):

Kasatkin concluded that the modifications produced in dreams by physical illness vary according to the duration of the illness, its seriousness, and its location, but that some common features can be distinguished:

(1) Illness is associated with an increase in dream recall.

(2) Illness causes dreams to become distressful and to include nightmarish violent images of war, fire, blood, corpses, tombs, raw meat, garbage, dirty water, or references to hospitals, doctors, and medicines (frightening feelings were associated with these images in 91 percent of the dreams, but pain was experienced in only 9 percent)

(3) These dreams usually appeared before the first symptoms of the illness;

(4) dreams caused by the illness are longer than distress dreams caused by ordinary annoyances and persist throughout the duration of the illness

(5) the content of the dreams can reveal the location and seriousness of the illness.

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