Nighttime dreams reflect waking time concerns.

Shifting media consumption before sleep can also help shift emotional content that appears in dreams.

Recently, I gave a talk on dreams followed by a Q&A. I usually get the same three questions at these events:

How do I remember my dreams?

Can passed loved ones visit us in a dream?

What can I do about nightmares?

This time, however, the entire hour of the Q&A was solely about nightmares.

What We Live, We Dream

To most people, dreaming and waking are two distinct states, almost like chapters in a book. One is real, and the other is, well, not—after all, how can we possibly think that a three-armed fish-man chasing us down the street has anything to do with our waking time? These two states are a lot closer than we think.

According to the continuity hypothesis, dreams reflect aspects of our waking time emotions and concerns (Domhoff, 2003). Over the years, numerous researchers have noted that a high percentage of dreams contain elements related to the previous day, known as day residue, or the preceding week, which is called a dream-lag effect (Grenier and colleagues, 2005).

It’s not just any part of our day that shows up in dreams, though. Dream content tends to reflect waking time concerns that are more emotional and inter-personal in nature than thoughts about the daily grist, such as schedules, finances, or work (Pesant and Zadra, 2006).

We typically don’t have dreams about the paperwork we’ll need to file three months from now. What we will dream about—and potentially have a nightmare about—are the fears, anxieties, and the emotional meaning we have attached to that task. It is the feelings that haunt us, not their practical details. And those........

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