The fragile, creative side of nightmares.

The fragile, creative side of nightmares

What kind of person has lifelong nightmares? In1931, psychoanalyst Ernest Jones suggested that the repeated intrusion of these fearful dreams into sleep is related to an "anxiety neurosis" and massively repressed incestual wishes.

But recent investigations of lifelongnightmare sufferers, including one study reported in the January ARCHIVES OF GENERAL PSYCHIATRY, describe a personality profile marked by emotional vulnerability, sensitivity, creativity and often some schizophrenic-like oddities of thought and behavior. "It appears that the ordinary fears, feelings of helplessness and rage of childhood, which we probably all experience, 'get through' in these persons and enter into their dreams more than they do in most of us," say psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann of Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston and his colleagues.

The investigators studied 12 lifelongnightmare sufferers, 12 vivid dreamers who had no nightmares and 12 persons who had neither nightmares nor vivid dreams. Each group contained six men and six women aged 20 to 35 years.

The group with nightmares had muchhigher scores on several scales of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (an extensive self-report questionnaire) than the other two groups; the elevated scores indicated distrust and oversensitivity to others, feelings of being different, poor self-esteem and alienation from feelings. Nightmare sufferers also had more creative and complex responses to Rorschach inkblots, often including themes of anxiety, violence, paranoia and an unclear "personality boundary." An example of this last theme was describing an inkblot as "two women merging into each other."

But only one nightmare sufterer wasclearly schizophrenic, say the researchers, and half of the nightmare group had no psychiatric diagnosis. Interviews and further projective tests uncovered no evidence of depression, an unusual number of fears, powerful hostilities, repressed sexual wishes or childhood trauma.

Compared with the other two groups,nightmare sufferers were more often unemployed or inconsistently employed. Those who were employed had occupations related to the arts and, according to Hartmann, often reported making use of their nightmares in their creative work. Marriages, sexual relationships and friendships of the nightmare sufferers were considerably more tumultuous than those of the control groups.

The results confirm prior observationsof 38 long-term nightmare sufferers (SN: 5/24/80, p.335), says Hartmann. Similar but less severe personality patterns have been independently noted among people with less frequent nightmares.

In contrast, war veterans experiencingfrequent nightmares as part of a post-traumatic stress disorder have not been found to have the openness, vulnerability or schizophrenic-like problems observed among lifelong nightmare sufferers. People with night terrors, which are sudden arousals early in the night associated with fear and screaming, but with either no dream content or a single frightening image, also do not display the personality profile of the lifelong nightmare group, notes Hartmann.

The relationship of lifelong nightmaresto schizophrenia and artistic creativity remains unclear, but Hartmann says the emotional vulnerability of nightmare sufferers may make them more vulnerable to mental disorders.