Many work in the field of sleep research, have lead to the development of hypotheses on the neurobiological mechanisms underlying dream mentation that may prove useful to our understanding of psychosis. From a phenomenological perspective, formal features globally defined as cognitive bizarreness have been shown to be equally represented in the dream and waking mentation of both schizophrenic and manic psychotic patients as in the dreams of healthy subjects.

The objective of this study was to perform a content analysis on a sample of dreams reported by psychotic patients and by a healthy control population.

We want to evaluate whether the dream experience is influenced or not by the state of acute psychosis.

We analyzed 210 dream reports of 72 inpatients ward for an acute psychotic break, 36 males and 36 females. Content analysis was performed by using the Hall/Van de Castle Scale, so the contents of dream reports were grouped into 9 categories (characters, social interactions, activities, emotions, settings, objects, descriptives, fortune/misfortune, success/failure). All contents were then quantified and compared with those found in the healthy control population.

The only statistically significant differences were a lower number of familiar settings in the dreams of female psychotic patients (h = −0.51) and lower aggressivity indices in the dreams of male psychotic patients (h = −0.49).

As dreams are basically the same in patients and controls, we can argue that the dreaming mental activity is not directly influenced by the psychotic mental state.