[1] According to new studies, dreams can fix your bad moods each night—and if you're depressed, dreams may predict whether you'll recover more quickly.
[2] It is natural to wake up in the morning with a sunny outlook, relieved of the previous evening's worries. In fact, studies show that a solid night of sleep improves moods in healthy individuals.
[3] But sleep's effects on healthy and depressed people are as different as night and day. People who are seriously depressed actually feel worse after sleeping, since they have more abstract, confusing dreams.
[4] Research led Rosalind Cartwright, Ph.D, director of the Sleep Research Center at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center in Chicago, to wonder how dreams allow our brains to repair our moods—and why this feel-good mechanism doesn't seem to work in the seriously depressed.
[5] In the first of two studies, Cartwright gave a mood test to normally healthy participants, recorded their sleep in a laboratory for one night, then gave them a second mood test when they rose in the morning. During the night, the volunteers were awakened now and then and asked to describe the content of their dreams. Subjects were divided into two groups: one having neutral feelings before bedtime and one with bad moods.
[6] Cartwright found that subjects who had been in neutral moods before sleeping had little change in attitude when they woke. Subjects who were generally not depressed but went to bed in a bad mood, however, reported feeling much better after a good night's sleep.
[7] This change was reflected in their dreams: people whose moods improved overnight reported experiencing more negative dreams at the beginning of the night and progressively fewer and fewer as sleep went on. Subjects in neutral moods had no change in the content of their dreams. [8] “The study shows that mood does get adjusted overnight,” says Cartwright. “If you go to sleep in a bad mood, your brain goes to work right away on negative dream material at the beginning of the night so your bad mood is reduced by the end of the night.”
[9] Next, Cartwright repeated the experiment using couples who were depressed by a recent marriage separation. While some unhappy patients dreamed less about serious emotional content and more about lighter topics as the night progressed, others had more disturbing dreams just before waking than at the beginning of sleep.
[10] Assuming that the former group was dreaming away their negative feelings each night, the researchers predicted that they would eventually work through their depression. And they were right—a follow-up study showed that 72% of the subjects in that group had fewer signs of depression one year later.
[11] “The last dream of the night is the one that patients are most likely to remember,” explains Cartwright.
[12] While the first group was actively working through their blues, resulting in more pleasant dreams at the end of the night and a brighter morning mood, those whose dreams became increasingly unpleasant were more likely to feel low when they woke.
[13] Still, this finding has a positive aspect. It allows sleep therapists to predict which of the depressed persons need the most help. It also tells them the topics that disturb their patients most.
[14] “If patients remember a bad dream,” notes Cartwright, “then whatever that dream is about,
that's what therapists should focus treatment on. The patient clearly isn't able to adjust his or her mood, and therapists should work on that.”—thus turning troubled visions into sweet dreams. ( 577 words)
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