You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In an epileptic seizure, certain brain areas discharge abnormally. Such brain areas may contain representations of body parts or of various elaborative behaviors involving body parts; they may also serve as substrata for other behaviors. Should the epileptic seizure occur during sleep and particularly in relation to a dream period, the nature of the dream may be influenced (Epstein and Hill 1966). A seizure occurring in the waking state may also influence on-going ideation, but in dreaming sleep, the state of consciousness is already altered and unique properties of mentation prevail. Indeed, these properties were regarded by Freud as a manifestation of, or at least offering a road to, another layer of the mind, the “unconscious.”
In this paper, factors entering into the formation of a brief dream occurring during an epileptic seizure are examined. Such an examination may throw light on the “unconscious,” in the sense that this term has equivalence in meaning to the dreaming mind or in Rado's (1956) sense of mind, nonreporting to waking awareness.