Manifest Dreams From Three Clinical Groups

Exploring Thematic Nightmare Content and Associated Self‐Harm Risk

“…These studies reported on the negative dream content of suicide attempters compared to depressed or psychiatric in‐patient controls. Contrastingly to our findings, suicide attempters showed greater proportions of themes pertaining to death, exhaustion, disintegration, annihilation, murder and killing, surrender, peaceful departures, and reunion with the dead (Evans, ; Firth et al., ; Langs, ; Maltsberger, ; Raphling, ). Our theme pertaining to Violence (theme 5) appears to be the closest approximation to themes in prior research, although no association was demonstrated here.…”

“…Future studies may wish to explore the relationship between nightmare content and suicidal intent at the time of a report. This may help elucidate whether suicidal intent explains the links between negative dream content and themes of death reported in prior research (Evans, ; Firth et al., ; Langs, ; Maltsberger, ; Raphling, ). We recommend that as with the present study, replications follow a longitudinal method of nightmare content acquisition to minimize re‐interpretation and memory biases (Robert & Zadra, ; Zadra & Donderi, ).…”

Development of Disturbing Dreams During Adolescence and Their Relation to Anxiety Symptoms

“…That anxiety scores were elevated for 13-and 16-year-old subjects who frequently recall disturbing dreams parallels, in a large stratified sample of young adolescents, what many research groups have observed for smaller groups of nightmare sufferers of various ages. [18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]30,31,38,64 Moreover, our findings for age 16 indicate that the recall of disturbing dreams is associated with clinically symptomatic anxiety indicators taken from the DSM-III-R. For subjects' own ratings on these measures, a significant association with disturbing dream recall was found on all three types of anxiety symptoms assessed, and for both sexes. However, the strongest effect was for overanxious disorder, a particularly extreme form of anxiety reflecting excessive or unrealistic fears about future or past behavior or performance in areas such as sports, school, or socializing.…”

‘No Man is an Island’: Effects of social seclusion on social dream content and REM sleep

“…As our study consisted of participants without psychiatric diagnoses, this finding suggests the tendency to be present in the subclinical range of symptoms. Interestingly, a study on 12 psychotically depressed patients found more, and only, family members in dreams compared to other patient groups (Langs, 1966). Overall, the number of social encounters and characters in our dreams seems to remain relatively stable, despite drastic changes in external social circumstances.…”