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I started my predoctoral psychology internship in a large hospital system when my daughter was only a few months old. I was seeing more patients than ever before, but the biggest adjustment was having to document the majority of my human interactions on a given day. Meanwhile, I had an infant to take care of at home in the evenings. One night, in the midst of one of my daughter’s sleep regressions, I was up multiple times in the middle of the night to feed her. While sleeping in between feedings, I dreamed that I heard her crying. My dream-self thought, “If I get up to feed her, I’m going to have to document it in the medical record afterwards. It’s too much work, let’s just skip it.”
The idea that I would have to update my own daughter’s (nonexistent) medical chart after every nursing session was absurd. But our dreams are often bizarre, particularly when we are stressed, aren’t they?
Daytime Emotions and Nighttime Dreaming
Humans have been trying to understand (and sometimes interpret) our own dreams for much of recorded history. The study of psychology has taken on this curiosity, and Sigmund Freud himself was no stranger to dream theory. There are two primary contemporary theories about the psychological function of dreams in processing emotion: The continuity theory suggests that dreams play a passive role in our emotional processing, and the emotion regulation theory suggests that dreams help us actively regulate emotions.
The Continuity Theory: Dreams as Background Music
The continuity theory suggests that our dreams reflect the types of thoughts and emotions that we are already experiencing while awake. Any role that dreams might play in emotional processing, according to this theory, is passive. Sometimes, our dreams include the same topics that we were thinking about during the day, just as I dreamed about medical records overnight while stressed about medical record documentation during the day. Both the mood (anxiety) and the content (medical documentation) matched. Other times, the mood will match, but the content will not. For example, many people dream that they totally forgot about a high school or college course until the day of the test, even decades after graduation. The dream mood might match their waking mood (stress), but the content (academic exams) doesn’t match their current waking reality. A key feature of the passive hypothesis is that we wake up from our dreams in a similar mood to how we felt during our dream. Meaning, if I fall asleep anxious about work and then have a stress dream, I’ll probably wake up in an anxious mood. The role of the dream is passive–it is merely a background score for the movie of our lives.
The evidence for the continuity theory primarily comes from studies that ask participants to rate their own emotions before, during, and after dreaming. Findings from some of these studies have shown that participants who had negative emotions before going to sleep at night were more likely to report having negative emotions while dreaming, and that both positive and negative dream moods were highly correlated with waking moods the next morning.
The Emotion Regulation Theory: Stress Dreams Are Putting In Work
On the other hand, the emotion regulation theory of dreaming suggests that dreams play an important role in helping us actively process our emotions, particularly negative emotions. The emotion regulation theory preserves the idea that our dream emotions are related to the moods that we experience during the day. However, it posits that an active emotion regulation process occurs during dreaming that leaves us feeling different the next day. According to the emotion regulation theory, my dreams about documenting my baby’s nursing sessions helped me work through my stress and feel better when I left for the hospital the next day.
One influential research study that supports the emotion regulation theory was led by Cartwright and colleagues. The research team recruited depressed, divorced participants to sleep overnight in a lab. Participants were woken up four times throughout the night and asked about their dreams. Those who reported dreaming about their ex-spouses in the sleep lab were more likely to see reductions in their depressive symptoms when the team followed up with them a year later. In a replication study with a different sample, the same research team found that participants who had more detailed, emotional dreams were more likely to see reductions in depression a year later. More recently, imaging studies such as one by Sterpenich and colleagues have shown that participants who report having fear-related dreams when they are awakened in the night show decreased activation in fear-related areas of the brain after they wake up. This suggests that their distressing dream might have benefited them by regulating pre-existing emotions of fear.
How Can These Theories Help My Sleep?
If you find the continuity theory compelling and want to reduce the likelihood of having a stress dream when feeling emotionally wired, use a buffer period before going to bed. Do something that is soothing or relaxing for the hour before bedtime in order to emotionally decompress: stretch, take a warm bath, fold laundry, read a book. Cultivating better habits related to sleep can also help build positive, calming associations with your bedroom that may improve your dreams.
It may be most beneficial in the long run, however, to radically accept that your stressful dreams may actually be helping you. Having a stress dream does not inherently mean that something is wrong with you or that you aren’t coping well with the stressors in your life. According to the emotion regulation theory, it could mean the opposite. In the studies of divorcees with depression, those dreaming in detail about their exes actually ended up feeling better a year later. It probably felt miserable to have those dreams and work through that pain every night. But in the end, the difficult dreams brought them closer to healing. The same could be true for you. Sometimes the words of Robert Frost hold: there is “no way out but through.”
