New research suggests dreams, even scary ones, serve a purpose. A University of Kansas study found that while fear in dreams can initially lead to a worse morning mood, individuals adept at emotional regulation tend to experience more fear. Intriguingly, dreams blending fear and joy may offer a protective effect against negative feelings the next day.
Turns out, every dream has a purpose. Even the ones you see with eyes closed! Science has long wondered about the meaning and reasoning behind dreams. Neuroscientists now think that even a scary dream serves a purpose.
A recent study by University of Kansas researcher Garrett Baber, tried to understand whether the emotions experienced in dreams influence how people feel the next day. The findings of the study are published in the peer-reviewed journal Sleep.
The impact of dreams on your reality
From sci-fi stories to rom-coms, people see all kinds of dreams. Researchers have now found that the impact of the dream may extend into the next day. For instance, you had a scary dream. Chances are, this dream could help you deal with fear in waking life, much like exposure therapy. Garrett Baber, a KU doctoral student in clinical psychology, decided to test this theory, and see if emotions experienced within dreams like fear and joy, change feelings the following morning.“The idea I’ve been most interested in was whether emotions in our dreams have any impact on our emotions in the day. We’re in a safe environment in our dreams. We cannot technically be harmed. If all goes wrong in a dream, we wake up.
As long as sleep is not really disrupted, if it’s not rising to the level of a nightmare, fear in our dreams might actually help us better deal with our emotions in the day,” Baber said. To understand it, Baber and his co-authors analyzed dream reports from more than 500 people. They used machine learning to sort emotions reported in dreams. They compared those dreamt emotions to participants’ emotional states the following day.“We wanted to apply new methods with bigger data. We had a much larger sample than a lot of studies use and used some advanced statistics to apply a more rigorous approach to testing why we dream. I didn’t reinvent the wheel in terms of creating a theory. I just wanted to put them to the test,” Baber explained. In larger datasets, the researchers used a customized large-language model to classify and quantify dreamt emotions, according to Baber.“I trained it to measure fear as well as joy. I asked it to read the dream text and produce a number for how afraid the person was in their dream, as well as how much positive emotion was present,” he said.He noted that if the ‘exposure therapy’ idea held, more fear in dreams should predict a better mood the following day.
What they found
The researchers got two different results. “On the day-to-day level, more fear in dreams was associated with worse mood in the morning.
However, people who reported using more adaptive emotion regulation strategies, such as acceptance rather than suppression — showed higher levels of fear in their dreams on average,” Baber said. This means there was a discrepancy in the findings.“In the short term, more fear in dreams is associated with worse mood. But at the individual level, people who are better at handling their emotions tend to have more fear in their dreams,” he said. The researchers also measured joy and fear in dreams. “We examined whether emotional complexity — experiencing multiple emotions at once — had any effect. We found when dreams contained both fear and joy at the same time, people were less likely to report negative mood in the morning. This was a novel finding. It suggests that emotional complexity in dreams may have a protective effect,” Baber said.
When does the emotional processing happen?
So when does the ‘emotional processing’ or the regulation take place? During a dream or when we reflect upon a dream?“There is no consensus on when emotional processing happens.
Early work assumed it occurs during the dream itself. I am testing whether it may be more important how dreams affect us later in the day. This study focused on the morning, but it may be that effects unfold much later. An emerging theory suggests that changes within the dream itself may reflect emotional regulation. The presence of both fear and joy may be an example of this,” Baber said.The researchers are now planning to test whether there is a difference between dreams that involve fear, or a mixture of fear and joy, and clinical nightmares.“Nightmares are typically defined as dreams that are so distressing they wake the person up, versus bad dreams where the person remains asleep. There are effective therapies for chronic nightmares, particularly for people with PTSD, where nightmares about traumatic experiences are common. There may be nuance in whether some forms of distressing dreams represent the brain trying to process emotions,” he said.
According to Baber, while chronic nightmares are associated with negative outcomes like mental and physical health challenges, which needs attention, the average bad dream might actually be a sign of the brain’s resilience.
