(Tereza Pultarova/ Live Science) — After a stressful day, you may hope to find some solace in sleep. But a new study from the United Kingdom suggests that stressful experiences from your day can make their way into your dreams.
The findings, published Nov. 30 in the journal Motivation and Emotion, suggest that, even in your sleep, you can’t escape your nagging boss and other daily pressures. And if you feel lonely and isolated in your daily life, those feelings and emotions can also infiltrate your dreams.
“Our results show that there really is something about the mind holding onto really powerful social experiences,” said lead study author Netta Weinstein, a senior lecturer in social and environmental psychology at Cardiff University, in the U.K. “If our lives are very challenging, that seems to repeatedly show and come back to us in the form of dreams.”
In the study, the researchers looked for links between people’s dream experiences and whether three particular psychological needs were fulfilled or left people feeling frustrated: the need to feel competent, the need to feel autonomous, and the need to feel related to other people. (…)