| Shrnutí: | The hippocampus is linked with both sleep and memory, but there is debate about
whether a salient aspect of sleep – dreaming – requires its input. To address this question, we
investigated if human patients with focal bilateral hippocampal damage and amnesia engaged in
dreaming. We employed a provoked awakening protocol where participants were woken up at
various points throughout the night, including during non-rapid eye movement and rapid eye
movement sleep, to report their thoughts in that moment. Despite being roused a similar number
of times, dream frequency was reduced in the patients compared to control participants, and the
few dreams they reported were less episodic-like in nature and lacked content. These results
suggest that hippocampal integrity may be necessary for typical dreaming to occur, and aligns
dreaming with other hippocampal-dependent processes such as episodic memory that are central
to supporting our mental life.
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