Dangerous waters: The impact of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami on survivor dream content.

Dreaming, Vol 33(4), Dec 2023, 369-387; doi:10.1037/drm0000254Episodic memories of emotionally salient and personally significant events are often incorporated into dreams, although rarely replayed identically to the original waking event except in replicative posttraumatic nightmares. We investigated, in five Swedish female 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami survivors, how episodic memories of the catastrophe were reflected in their dreams after trauma, both in retrospectively recalled nightmares and bad dreams, and in prospective dream diaries completed several months after the catastrophe. We also assessed whether the emotional and threatening dream content differed between the trauma and a matched control group. Based on the threat simulation theory, we predicted that the trauma group dreams would portray notable similarities with elements related to the original tsunami trauma, and that the trauma group would demonstrate a higher prevalence of negative emotional states, and a higher frequency of threatening dream events as well as more severe threats in their dreams. Only the first hypothesis was partially supported, with retrospective nightmares bearing higher similarity to the trauma experience than the prospective dream diary dreams. However, we observed no statistically significant differences in emotional or threatening dream content between the groups, suggesting that the trauma group participants were not suffering from significant posttraumatic dreaming at the time of sys...
Source: Dreaming - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research