Four personality traits can make people more prone to nightmares. Do you have one?
People with certain mental health conditions may be prone to nightmares, a study suggests.
Researchers in Texas surveyed 116 college students about their tendency to suffer from nightmares.
The team then examined the links between nightmare frequency and four personality dispositions: neuroticism, nightmare tendency, thin psychological boundaries, and sensory processing sensitivity.
The study found people prone to nightmares were more likely to be emotionally unstable and prone to stress, and also had more difficulty regulating their mood.
These qualities can cause people suffering from stress to become more internalized and their experiences to manifest as vivid and disturbing images in nightmares.
Furthermore, people with thin psychological boundaries – those who have difficulty separating emotions from reality – may not be able to filter out disturbing images and emotions while they sleep.
These traits have been linked to mental disorders such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which could explain why people with these conditions report frequent nightmares.
However, neurotic participants – people with a greater tendency to feel fear and guilt – were no more likely to have nightmares than non-neurotic people.
People prone to nightmares were more likely to be emotionally unstable and prone to stress, a recent study suggests (stock image)
William Kelly, study author and associate professor at the University of the Incarnate Word in Texas, shared PsyPost: ‘It’s not “abnormal” to have nightmares. It seems that there are dispositions that influence them.
‘In our study, individuals who had more nightmares also tended to have a smaller gap between different mental experiences, in addition to the tendency to have negative emotions more easily and experience them in different forms.
“It is as if in certain people there is a tendency for an unpleasant mental event to spread through the mind, like a storm that arouses disturbing images and emotions in dreams.”
The researchers said that people prone to nightmares may experience a process called “concretization.” This is when abstract mental experiences take on more tangible forms, such as disturbing images in dreams.
These individuals are then more likely to internalize stress and turn it into disturbing dreams.
People with thin psychological barriers, meanwhile, are more likely to see disturbing images in their dreams and have trouble filtering them out, leading to nightmares.
Furthermore, the team found that people with sensory processing sensitivity – increased sensitivity to internal and external stimuli – did not have an increased risk of nightmares.
Kelly said: ‘We were surprised that sensory processing sensitivity was not linked to nightmares, as in previous studies, and that it seemed to fit well with thin mental boundaries.
‘We do not yet understand this finding.’
There were several limitations to the study, the most significant of which was the use of a sample size of primarily college students. This means that the findings do not take into account older people or people without school-related stressors.
The team said they hope to expand the research by studying the impact of nightmares on different populations.
Kelly said: ‘Nightmares are experienced, at least occasionally, by a relatively large number of people with and without mental health problems. Yet their causes remain mysterious.
‘We tried to understand what the key psychological dispositions are that seem to influence nightmares.’