Dreams as Healing: The Remarkable Resilience Afforded by the Dreams of Ukrainian Refugee Women
Polish researcher finds that our dreams can provide psychological support when we need it most. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it triggered one of Europe’s largest refugee movements in recent history. Among the millions who fled, countless women carried not just hastily packed belongings, but profound psychological wounds from witnessing war’s devastation. Yet
Experts Reach Consensus on CBT for Nightmares
Tackle the most intense, vivid and distressing nightmare first. Pick up helpful themes in the dreams. Pay attention to sleep hygiene and learn to relax before falling asleep. Consider cultural beliefs. And treat both trauma-related nightmares and those with no known origin the same way. These are a few of the main recommendations from an
Anxiety Dominated our Dreams in 2024 with a Spike During US Election
Were anxiety and fear predominant dream emotions for you in 2024? If so, you’re not alone. More than 70% of the 13,000 dreams collected in 2024 by the Dream Decoder app featured fearful or anxious emotions, revealing how deeply modern life’s stressors may be resonating within us. On the brighter side, as the year unfolded,
Trauma Nightmares and Mental Health: Realistic Dreams a Key Warning Sign
A veteran who dreams about being back in the thick of an intense battle, or a car accident victim who repeatedly wakes up from a nightmare just before what feels like a potentially fatal impact… dreams that create vivid and direct experience of someone’s most traumatic memories are clinical red flags. A new study offers
Living in the Mind’s Darkness: Understanding Aphantasia
In my work is an experiential and dream therapist, I often invite my clients to enter their dreams, allowing their nocturnal imagery to re-form in their mind’s eye. Most people I ask can do this quite easily, and some produce a virtual torrent of imagery. But not everyone can, and I used to think of
Peering Into the ‘Black Box’ of Dreaming
How Technology is Making Our Dream Worlds More Accessible and Malleable One aspect of dreams that makes them so mysterious is that they are notoriously difficult to study. While those who dream vividly or lucidly can accurately report their detailed dream content, most of us imperfectly capture fragments of our dreams and are left with
Why We Forget Our Dreams: A New Perspective
One of the most enduring paradoxes in the field of dream research is the mystery of dream amnesia. Why do we forget most of our dreams, even though they’re often vivid, emotionally charged, and potentially important for our survival? A recent paper by Zhao and colleagues offers an elegant solution to this puzzle. Here’s the
Influencing Dream Content and Creativity
Fascinating new research that confirms what creative minds like Salvador Dalí and Thomas Edison intuited long ago – the drowsy period as we drift off to sleep can supercharge our creative abilities. Researchers from MIT and Harvard (Horowitz et al., 2020, 2023) demonstrated that deliberately influencing dreams during sleep onset (known as N1 sleep or
I was recently asked this question by Women’s Health magazine, and it led to some interesting further reading and provocative thoughts. An amazing half of people asked will say they had a precognitive dream at some point in their lives. Does this mean dreams can predict the future? So far, there is no scientific evidence