Can fear in dreams influence how we react to emotions during the day?

Dreaming is a universal human experience, yet its function remains one of science’s greatest mysteries. Over the past decades, several researchers have suggested that dreams may help us process emotions and prepare for real-life challenges. But are the emotions we experience during sleep actually linked to the way we respond to the world when we are awake? A new study conducted by scientists from the University of Turku, Finland, together with colleagues from other European and North American institutions, set out to explore this question.

The study involved 87 adults aged between 18 and 70 years who kept daily dream diaries for one week, recording both the emotions experienced in their dreams and their sleep quality. Participants then completed a laboratory task in which they viewed neutral and negative images while their brain activity was monitored using electroencephalography (EEG). In addition to the brain recordings, researchers also collected participants’ subjective ratings of the emotional intensity evoked by the images.

The findings revealed that participants who reported higher levels of fear in their dreams showed a stronger brain response to negative images while awake. However, this association was observed only among participants who had reported better sleep quality during the preceding week. Among those with poorer sleep quality, the opposite pattern emerged: higher levels of fear in dreams were associated with a weaker brain response to negative images.

Interestingly, this relationship was not reflected in participants’ subjective evaluations. Although the brain data revealed differences in the processing of negative stimuli, individuals who experienced more fear in their dreams did not report stronger emotional reactions than other participants. Moreover, the study found no evidence that fear, or negative emotions more generally, was associated with a greater or lesser ability to regulate unpleasant emotions while awake.

According to the authors, the results suggest a link between fear experienced in dreams and the way the brain responds to negative stimuli during wakefulness. This association may reflect individual differences in sensitivity to negative stimuli and also appears to depend on sleep quality, highlighting the importance of studying dreaming and sleep together to better understand emotional health.

The study Fear in Dreams Predicts Stronger Affect Reactivity in Wakefulness, published in the journal Sleep, was supported by the Bial Foundation through project 295/20 – Peace of Mind and Emotion Regulation: Survey-based, Behavioural, and Neuroscientific Investigations, led by Pilleriin Sikka.

ABSTRACT

Sleep plays an important role in affective processing and affect regulation during wakefulness. Dreaming—the subjective experiences occurring during sleep—has been suggested to reflect, or even contribute to, waking affect regulation. However, the role of dream affect in waking affect regulation has rarely been studied directly. Here, we investigated how dream affect relates to waking affect reactivity and regulation at the between-person level. Over 7 days, 87 participants (18 - 70 y, M = 27.23, SD = 11.75; 76 females) kept dream journals and rated their dream affect and sleep quality each morning upon awakening. They then completed an affect reactivity and regulation task in the laboratory while their brain activity was measured using electroencephalography. Participants were shown negative and neutral pictures and instructed to either (1) look at the pictures and experience affect elicited by the pictures or (2) downregulate their affective responses. We analyzed subjective ratings of valence and arousal as well as the late positive potential (LPP), a well-validated index of affect reactivity and regulation. Multiple linear regression analyses showed that participants with higher average levels of dream fear and good sleep quality displayed stronger affect reactivity (indexed by larger LPP amplitudes) to negative pictures. No significant relationship emerged between dream affect and subjective ratings of affect reactivity or between dream affect and waking affect regulation. These results support, at the between-person level, continuity between dream affect and objective, neurophysiological affect reactivity in wakefulness but not continuity in subjective affective experiences.