What our dreams say about the level of anxiety

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Research revealed three themes that occur in our dreams and report increased levels of anxiety. For example, they include the appearance in dreams of former partners.

Since ancient times, mankind has been trying to figure out what these or other dreams mean. There are whole dream books deciphering the appearance in a dream of any characters and objects from cats and dogs to old cabinets and crows in the sky.

However, all of them are not based on a serious scientific basis. And scientists from the University of Düsseldorf have published the results of a study that shows that the content of dreams of people suffering from anxiety disorders can already be assumed to have these mental problems.

The study identified three themes that are much more common in mainstream patients with anxiety disorders. For example, the appearance in these dreams of former partners with whom you have already broken up. Also, in people with anxiety disorders, dreams have a more powerful emotional coloring, and the images in these dreams change at a much faster rate than in people whose psyche is fine.

The authors of the study decided to establish specific characteristics that more characteristic of people with anxiety disorders, and this could be done only by comparing their dreams with what healthy volunteers saw at night.

So, the first group included 38 people with anxiety disorders, and the control group – 38 persons without them. All of them were asked to keep diaries, where they wrote down dream plots, fill out questionnaires, and go through sleep analyzes face to face with a psychotherapist. Later, the obtained results were compared. It should be noted that not all people remember what they dreamed at night, and many think that they do not dream anything.

This is due to the fact that the brain quickly discards this information, as it considers it important and considers it it is better not to clutter up the memory with it. But if you have time to record the plot of the dream immediately after waking up, it will remain recorded. Otherwise, you will literally forget what you dreamed about in a matter of minutes.