What does having a bad dream depend on?
The authors studied young and healthy university students who are especially good at recalling their dreams. Furthermore, they can remember the content of their dreams after waking up several times a week. In this study, participants were asked to complete short questionnaires three times a day on an online platform for three weeks. After waking up, participants had to submit the first questionnaire, in which they assessed the quality of their sleep, remembered their previous night's sleep and indicated on a five-point scale how much the following emotions characterized them: joy, remorse, satisfaction, surprise, fear, curiosity, sadness, security, anger, shame and uncertainty. The second and third questionnaires consisted of items related to their mood and psychotic experiences, which were conducted in the afternoon and evening. The aim of the study was to examine the temporal relationship between psychotic experiences and dream emotions.
The researchers showed that the psychotic experiences recorded during the day were clearly related to the emotions experienced in the night dream that followed.
The unusual experiences reported in the evening led to more conspicuously negative dreams at night,
and the positive mood in the evening also predicted the positive nature of dreams. However, the negative effects of increased psychosis-like experiences were much more pronounced and made dreams more emotionally negative. In contrast, the reverse relationship could not be detected: the quality of the dreams and the emotions experienced in the dreams did not predict the emotional experiences reported during the following day.
Based on the results, therefore, it seems that those who are generally more prone to unusual experiences, dispersion, or lack of joy also have a bad or strange mood in their dreams. In addition, the appearance of more negative and strange dreams seems to predict the increase of daytime concentration problems and bizarre experiences within the person. However, a statistical relationship in reverse was not detected (i.e., the emotional characteristics of the dreams did not predict the experiences of the next day's schizophrenia).
Consequently, the study shows that the experiences of the pre-sleep period have a more significant impact on our dreams, but our dreams have little effect on the next day.
The full study can be found at the following link: