Abstract
Several studies have highlighted associations between adverse life events and the dysphoric character of dream experiences. This degree of continuity between waking-life and dream content seems partly attributed to the emotional and personal attachment linked to the incorporated waking experiences. Numerous changes in the processing of emotion-related stimuli are also reported across different human developmental stages. Therefore, we were interested in testing whether age would modulate the impact of recent troubling experiences on dream characteristics. Two hundred sixty participants, evenly distributed in five developmental stages, matched for gender and their exposure to a troubling experience, were selected from a large sample collected for a previous normative study of dreams of Canadians. Participants completed a dream questionnaire from which independent judges subsequently scored the dreams. We observed no interactions between the experience of troubling events and age. However, individuals who experienced a recent troubling event reported a higher frequency of nightmares and their dreams were more emotionally negative. Participants who experienced a moderately severe troubling event were also more likely to experience a dream whose maximal threat severity was of moderate intensity. Adolescents and young adults had dreams with a higher level of oneiric threats compared to older adults (>40 years old). Young adults also reported a higher frequency of nightmares compared to older adults. Our findings have implications for modern dream theories. They also suggest that dysphoric dreams might serve as potential proxies of mental health status and developmental stages. Future studies are now needed to explore the implications of these findings for psychological adaptation.
Highlights
There is evidence for a certain degree of continuity between waking-life and dream content
It was found that changes in psychological well-being are correlated with similar changes in emotional dream content [9] and significant life experiences such as pregnancy can be well represented with distortions in dreams [10]
We only observed a small degree of continuity between the severity of troubling events experienced within the last year and severity of threats in dreams, as this relationship was only present when the adverse event and dream threat were of moderate intensity
Summary
There is evidence for a certain degree of continuity between waking-life and dream content. It is postulated that dream features reflect waking-life experiences and/or that dreams impact psychological adaptation. The former concern dream formation theories and the latter dream function theories. Research so far suggests that the reflection of waking life in dreams is mostly selective, distorted and that features, such as reading and writing (i.e., mundane tasks), very seldomly find their way into dreams [2]. Continuity between dream content and waking life was observed within complex individual characteristics, such as personality [3, 4], physical health [5], social roles [6] and individual concerns [7, 8]. Of overall interest is the observation that, once the proper physiological substrate and cognitive capacity are achieved, dream construction prioritizes emotional waking-life experiences and concerns with a negative bias [12, 13]
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