Topic: Study: Her nightmares are about relationships & His are --

[FerminaDaza]

Men and women need not be awake to experience the world differently, a study suggests: Even our bad dreams are quite different. 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.

[Newser]