Nightmares or nightstallions…?
(Wake up, dear…)
Ah well, Tammy Wynette was right: Sometimes, it’s hard to be a woman…:
“Women suffer more nightmares than men because they find it harder to switch off their emotions at the end of the day, research has found. They carry their worries into their dreams, and continue to process emotional concerns while they are asleep, according to the study. The findings came from a study of 193 male and female volunteers at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol. When asked to record their most recent dream, 19 per cent of male students reported having a nightmare compared to 34 per cent of women.”
I’m not quite sure I trust the results of this latest bit of research. For decades now, we have been told that women are better at dealing with their emotions than men, because they talk about them more – while men bottle these things up, which then leads to ulcers, heart-attacks, teeth-grinding, hair loss and what have you.
So, one would expect that if emotions lay at the basis of our nightmares, men would suffer from them more than women do. (Hell, maybe we do but are simply better at repressing those nightmares too…?)
Anyway, the whole study of dreams is endlessly fascinating but it is rather doubtful that there is such a direct, causal link between certain emotions and nightmares. On the whole, people don’t dream more happy dreams when they are happy, erotic dreams when they are wildly in love or football dreams during a world cup tournament. The inner workings of our brain are a bit more subtle than that.
Still, there might be a much simpler answer to the question why women seem to have more nightmares than men. I mean, it might be that I’m a bit biased here, as a heterosexual male but I’m sure I would have more nightmares too, if, like so many women do on a daily basis, I had to wake up next to some bloody guy.
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