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Dreams: Here’s What Your Recurring Nightmares Actually Mean

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Given these difficult times during the pandemic, it is no surprise that many people have reported having an increase in bad dreams and nightmares.  

We all dream as part of our sleep cycle and label it as REM (rapid eye movement) stage of the cycle.  Some remember their dreams and many do not as the dreams fade from memory.  Certainly fascination with dreams throughout all civilizations and cultures, and Sigmund Freud made an attempt to connect dreams to personality and emotions.   There has been much research since Freud’s time that have looked at dreaming in a different way as related to daily functioning of our cognitive processes rather than as a window into the hypothesized (Freudian) unconscious.  This interesting article focuses specifically on recurrent bad dreams and recent research. 

“Everyone has a bad dream once in a while. But having the same one over and over may signal that something specific is missing in your daily life, new research suggests. Men and women in the study who felt frustrated and incompetent during the day were more likely to have recurrent bad dreams at night than those who felt satisfied and in control.  Other research has suggested that positive or negative emotions carry over into dreams, and that bad dreams may represent the leftover parts (active link) of poorly processed experiences, the authors wrote in their study published in the journal Motivation and Emotion. (active link) Less is known about the role of social and environmental cues—how people relate to themselves and those around them—in shaping dreams.”  For the student of psychology, the article focuses on how the research is conducted and the conclusions of various studies.  Well worth reading!

SOURCE

Time, December 15, 2017, by Amanda MacMillan

LINK TO RESOURCE

https://time.com/5060932/recurring-nightmares-psychology/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-share-article&utm-term=health_sleep

(Tiny URL)  https://tinyurl.com/24cx3fa9

CLASS DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

•According to your textbook, how does dreaming fit into the normal sleep cycle and REM activity?

•Using your textbook, what are the hypothesized functions of dreaming?

•The article discusses research studies on recurrent dreams.  What are recurrent dreams?  What are the hypothesized causes of recurrent dreams?  What are the conclusions of the research studies?