What is the special section about?
This special section of Dreaming tackles the complex relationship between waking variables and nightmares. Its articles explore what these disturbing dreams can reveal about dreamers’ waking lives, emphasizing the dreams’ implications for suicide risk, psychological distress, and interpersonal experiences. The concept of concretization is introduced as a potential mechanism underlying frequent nightmares, independent of traditional risk factors. The results of a study conducted to inform the development of a new scale to assess relational nightmares underscore thematic continuities between unsettling waking experiences, such as grief, and recurrent nightmares. Together, these articles deepen the understanding of nightmares’ psychological complexities and inform targeted interventions to address distressing dream experiences effectively.
What is the significance of this special section?
Nightmares are often considered by mental health professionals to be a sleep disturbance or part of a symptom constellation of other disorders, such as posttraumatic stress disorder. However, dream researchers distinguish between nightmare types, such as idiopathic, trauma-related, and complex nightmares (i.e., nightmares with comorbid sleep and breathing diagnoses). The research published in this section explores the roles of different nightmare types in particular psychological problems and of particular waking issues in producing nightmares and particular nightmare content. These findings underscore the importance of understanding that nightmares are more than simple sleep disturbances. This understanding may provide insights that can inform tailored mental health interventions and reveal the nuanced psychological processes underlying nightmare experiences.
Tell us about a few key takeaways.
- In “Nightmare Types and Suicide” (Youngren et al., 2024), trauma-related nightmares emerge as a critical predictor of suicide risk, underscoring the urgent need for targeted interventions for individuals haunted by past trauma. Complex nightmares were associated with increased use of mental health treatment interventions but not suicidality specifically, whereas idiopathic nightmares predicted neither, implying that they may be a more innocuous phenomenon.
- In “Concretization as a Possible Mechanism for Nightmare Proneness: Some Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Findings” (Kelly et al., 2024), theoretical considerations around concretization—a proposed defensive style in which vague and unpleasant inner states are made more tangible—reveal a potential link to frequent nightmares, highlighting the psychological nuances underlying nightmare experiences.
- In “Relational Nightmares: A New Scale and Test of the Continuity Hypothesis of Dreams Applied to Nightmares in a Young Adult Sample” (Kelly & Kim, 2024), the process of developing a new scale to explore relational nightmares unveils significant associations with unsettling waking relational experiences such as general trauma, negative affect, and negative waking relational experiences (e.g., relational worries, insecure attachment styles, and grief), but no relationship with positive waking relational experiences (e.g., social support and friendship closeness). Among the waking relational experiences, grief was an especially strong predictor of relational nightmares.
What are some practical implications of the articles featured in this special section?
The featured articles underscore how mental health practitioners can use nightmares as valuable diagnostic and therapeutic indicators. Understanding nightmare types and their psychological underpinnings can inform tailored treatments, especially for individuals at heightened suicide risk because of their trauma-related nightmares. Moreover, the exploration of concretization and thematic continuities between waking and dreaming experiences opens avenues for targeted interventions that address underlying psychological processes linked to nightmare proneness and distress. Finally, exploring the content of relational nightmares can be useful in processing the contributing interpersonal issues.