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Monday, February 3, 2014
Women's Nightmares Are About Relationships; Men's Are About Disasters
A new study from the journal Sleep peers into
the gendered nature of the unconscious and
maybe finds that we've all been incepted by
the patriarchy.
Dream scientists already know that women
have already found that women report having
significantly more nightmares than men do,
but few studies have attempted to explore
why that occurs or what it means. This new
Sleep study does that, among other things,
and it finds that nightmare themes vary by
gender. Whereas men are more likely to have
nightmares about natural disasters, being
chased, or insects, women more frequently
have them about interpersonal conflicts. At
Slate, Katy Waldman points out that women's
nightmares also tend to feature "feelings of
humiliation, frustration or inadequacy."
It's worth noting that here a nightmare is
defined not as a scary dream, but rather as a
"disturbing mental experience" that result in
the sleeper waking up. Therefore, it doesn't
necessarily mean that women are more likely
to have bad dreams about relationships — the
study's findings just indicate that the fear of
interpersonal fallout and associated emotions
— guilt, shame, embarrassment, etc. — may
"elicit a more intense emotional response in
women leading to a greater proportion of such
dreams ending in a nightmare awakening."
For men, I guess, bugs and volcanoes and
pursuers will do that.
Waldman asked Antonio Zadra, one of the
study's authors, what he thought of the
gender discrepancy. His explanation was that
"for women, on average, social or
interpersonal dimensions may be more
emotionally salient." Anecdotally, this makes
sense to me: although I have bad dreams that
touch on a whole slew of themes, I only ever
feel distressed enough to wake up when I do
irreparable dream-damage to an important
relationship. I've had several bad dreams
about, like, malicious wizards and zombies and
so on in the past year, but I only ever woke up
in a state of terror when I dreamt that I'd
angrily poured beer in my best friend's eye
and then we became worst enemies (beer in
the eye will do that to a friendship).
What reoccurring nightmare-themes do you
have? Do you feel incepted by the patriarchy?
Discuss.
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