Scientists explain the causes of negative emotions in a dream

Scientists have come to the conclusion that the stress experienced during the day directly affects the emotions in a dream: the harder the day went, the more negative experiences, such as fear, sadness and anger, come to dreams, and the usual ways to cope with stress during the day do not protect against this. The work was published in the journal Dreaming.

Researchers at SRH University in Heidelberg followed 65 participants who recorded their dreams for fourteen days, and collected 276 dreams. In 39 percent of them, there were expressed negative emotions, and about 11 percent of the participants themselves called nightmares, and most of the dark dreams were associated with financial worries and problems in relationships.

The most surprising finding was that daytime stress management did not reverse its effects on sleep, and participants who often relied on support from loved ones or tried to think positively did not necessarily have fewer negative dreams than those who coped in less healthy ways. This suggests that the emotions that we experience in a dream, quite directly reflect the daytime stress, and “speak” it with the effort of the will does not work, because the dream as if recycles the accumulated tension for the day in its own way.

For practice, this is important: if a person is tormented by nightmares, it is worth fighting primarily with the source of stress, not only with the dreams themselves. The authors note that the sample was small and consisted mainly of female students, so the findings will have to be tested on more diverse groups. Dreams and their emotional coloring have long been on the sidelines of serious science, but today they are actively studied as a window into the brain and psyche, and nightmares and anxious dreams are associated with stress, trauma and sleep disorders, so that their frequency can be a signal of trouble. Understanding how daytime experiences turn into nocturnal experiences helps fight sleep disorders better.

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