Bad Dreams, Nightmares, and Their Emotional Impact: Fear is Not the Culprit

Based on a new study conducted by researchers at the University of Montreal, nightmares have a greater emotional effect than bad dreams (as you could have guessed). However, their findings focused on the emotional impact of these dreams. Surprisingly, they discovered that fear is mostly absent in bad dreams and elicited in only a third of nightmares.

Researchers at the university were able to obtain narratives of nearly 10,000 dreams for this sample pool. They found that feelings of sadness, disgust, guilt, and confusion were a result of bad dreams and nightmares. The results of the study were published in the last issue of Sleep journal.

"Physical aggression is the most frequently reported theme in nightmares," wrote Genavieve Robert and Antonio Zadra, two of the researchers who participated in the study, in this EurekAlert! article. "Moreover, nightmares become so intense they will wake you up. Bad dreams on the other hand, are especially haunted by interpersonal conflicts." 

Death and health concerns are typically themes in nightmares, but it's not always those specific factors that characterize the threatening atmosphere that cause people to wake up. In one of the reported nightmare narratives, the subject simply saw an owl perched on a tree branch and became absolutely terrified, which caused them to awaken.

Nightmare themes also differ in men and women. The study suggested that men are more likely to have nightmares that possess themes of disasters (floods, earthquakes, and war) whereas women are twice as likely to have nightmares containing themes of interpersonal conflict.

However, these nightmare and bad dream issues only consistently occur in 5-6 percent of the population. Scientists have documented that everyone dreams, whether they remember it or not. Dreams occur during the stage of sleep called 'REM sleep' (the deepest stage of sleep), which people go through three to five times per night (about 20-25% of a total sleep cycle).

To read more about the Montreal University study, visit this EurekAlert! article.