dreaming with content of obsessions before relapse of clinical symptoms in a rare case of obsessive-compulsive disorder

Background and objective: obsessive-compulsive disorder (ocd) is considered as a chronic disabling psychiatric disease with poor response to pharmacological treatments. the poor understanding of mechanistic links between psy-chiatric diagnoses and sleep abnormalities contributes to the lack of certainty; a clarification of its relationship with dream content seems interesting. case report: the case was a 37-year-old iranian woman with ocd. the dreams with obsessive content had begun almost two months before the recurrence of the clinical symptoms. as she got closer to the time of the relapse of clinical symptoms, she had more frequent and longer dreams with content of washing; treatment began with clomipramine. recurrence of the next episode also started with dreams. after the last episode, she continued her medication and cur-rently she is symptom-free for the past two years. conclusion: the correlation of the dreams' content and clinical symptoms of ocd can be a clue for early diagnosis of symptoms and helps prevent clinical symptoms. however, we cannot neglect the effects of the disorder on brain func-tion and sleep structure.