The Mail on Sunday‘s Roger Dobson has brought an interesting story to my attention today. It’s a report about a study from researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and published in the journal Sleep. And it says that people who have frequent nightmares (just 5.1 percent of us have one once a week, apparently – compared with the 85 percent of adults who only have one nightmare a year) are more likely to have health problems such as insomnia and mental health problems such as mood disorders.
Not just that, but the study suggests women are more likely to suffer from frequent bad dreams than men (6.2 percent of women have regular nightmares compared to 3.8 percent of men), as are people on low incomes, people who suffer from insomnia and ‘sleep-disordered breathing symptoms’ (by which I assume they mean things like sleep apnea), as well as those who suffer from ‘sleep-related daytime consequences’ (and again, I assume this means things like feeling sleep during the day or having trouble getting up in the morning).
In fact, they state that if you suffer from frequent nightmares, you are almost six times as likely to have a psychiatric disorder than someone who doesn’t have bad dreams. AND people who have regular nightmares are more neurotic too. Yikes.
This was something I hadn’t come across before, so I did a swift bit of research (okay, I admit, a bit of googling) to see what else was out there in terms of nightmares being associated with health problems. And there doesn’t seem to be much – but here goes:
• In an echo of the above just-published study, an Australian study, published in the journal Dreaming, dispelled the often-held belief that nightmares are the subconscious’s way of dealing with stress and other emotional problems. That’s because it found students who had bad dreams were more likely to be distressed about them and therefore more likely to suffer from general anxiety than others who slept without having nightmares.