Carlos Solis
Even nightmares can serve a purpose, psychologists and neuroscientists say. One common theory holds that fear experienced in dreams helps people cope with fear in waking life.
Garrett Baber, a clinical psychology graduate student at the University of Kansas, tested that idea with his team. The scientists were especially interested in how dream emotions—like fear and joy—change how we feel the next morning. They published their findings in the journal SLEEP.
“I was most interested in whether the emotions we feel in dreams affect our emotions during the day,” Garrett Baber said. “When we’re asleep, we’re in a safe environment. Technically nothing is threatening us. If something goes wrong in a dream, we wake up. If a dream doesn’t get interrupted and doesn’t reach the level of a nightmare, it can help us handle our daytime emotions better.”
What the study found about dreams and daytime emotions
The team analyzed dream reports from more than 500 people. The scientists used machine learning to identify the emotions volunteers experienced in their dreams. Then they compared those dream emotions with the participants’ moods the next day, Medical Xpress reported.
“We had a much larger sample than many studies, and we used some advanced statistical methods to test the causal factors behind the dreams,” Baber said. He added that to classify and quantify the emotions in the dream reports, the researchers used a custom model to process large volumes of language data.
In the end, the scientists found two different patterns. Intense fear in dreams was linked to a worse mood in the morning. But people who typically used adaptive emotion-regulation strategies—those who accepted emotions rather than suppressing them—actually experienced more fear in their dreams. In other words, creepy dreams were more common among people who accept their emotions.
Another finding concerned the emotional complexity of dreams—experiencing several different emotions at once. The team found that when a dream contained both fear and joy, people were less likely to wake up with a negative mood. “This is a new finding. It suggests that emotional complexity in dreams may have a protective effect,” Baber said.
The team’s next step will be to distinguish between dreams that involve fear (or a mix of fear and joy) and clinical nightmares.
Photo: Openverse
