New research suggests that the dream content of people with anxiety disorders may differ significantly from those of healthy individuals, identifying three themes that are more common in the dreams of patients with anxiety.
These include dreams about a past love affair, more emotionally intense dreams, and higher speed visions being more common.
Study published in the journal Dreaming by researchers at the University of Dusseldorf to examine specific features that occur in the dreams of people with clinical anxiety disorder and compare them to the dreams of healthy individuals.
Two groups of dreamers, 38 with the disorder and 38 healthy people, were followed and then compared using dream diaries, questionnaires, and individual dream analyzes.
Studies have shown that people with anxiety disorders are more likely to dream about certain scenarios and themes than healthy people (archive image)
The researchers concluded that there was a significant difference in dream content, with several issues being more common in people with anxiety disorders.
These include chases, physical assault, freezing from fear, death of loved ones, and accidents such as plane crashes and others.
The dreams of people with anxiety disorders not only contain many of these negative traits, but also less positive traits with less friendly interaction or success.
They also contain more characters, places, travel and transportation, and verbal communication than the dreams of healthy people.
In addition to some recurring themes in the dreams of anxiety sufferers, there were three common descriptive features.
These include dreams about a former love interest, including former partners.
Another feature is that the dreams of people with anxiety disorders often involve a lot of power and speed, for example fast moving vehicles.
A third feature was the overall subjective intensity of the dream, which the researchers said was greater in patients with anxiety.
When it comes to imagining emotions, anxious patients experienced more negative emotions such as anger, fear, anxiety, and sadness, and less positive emotions such as happiness.
This led lead author and psychologist Anton Rimsh, from Universität Düsseldorf in Germany, to suggest that the dreams of anxious patients “may represent a terrifying, hostile, and dangerous environmental experience in their waking lives.”
“We can therefore assume that the presence of an anxiety disorder leads to greater subjective intensity of dream experiences and dream imagery in general.
“Consistent with this view, we conclude that in patients with anxiety, dream content is not only experienced in large numbers, but also experienced by them with particularly high intensity and subjective emphasis.”
The researchers noted that sample sizes were small and patients with generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, and panic disorder were overrepresented.
They said that patients with specific phobias, separation anxiety disorder and agoraphobia are underrepresented, so more research could be conducted with more participants and a fairer representation of different anxiety disorders.
Source: Daily Mail
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