Most dreams comprised of negative emotions?

[ImBored]

In many documentaries, lectures, and articles about dreams, I have heard that most dreams consist of mostly negative emotions; emotions such as fear, anger, or jealousy. And that claim would seem to hold true if you look at any site with dream journals, it seems like every other journal entry is about a nightmare or bad dream. But maybe that's because bad dreams are more memorable. However, this is not true in my personal experience. I can say with certainty that the last nightmare (or even bad dream) I had was well over a year ago. As far as I can remember. So I can confidently say that my good to bad dream ratio is 1:365 at it's worst. I want to know what other people's dreams are like in regards to nightmares, or dreams that just have a "bad" feeling to them. How often do you have them. This isn't important information or anything, I'm just curious.

[melanieb]

My actual nightmares...I can count on two hands...for my whole life. I'm 40. Honestly, most of my dreams are just cool, but I think it has to do with my mentality. I doubt a graph of dreams that surveyed a large population would put me anywhere near the middle of the curve. Consider yourself lucky.

[Zoth]

What do you consider bad? I think what the experts are trying to say is that there is a negative component in most dream plots. For example, more often you in a position of confrontation, than meeting with your date. Anxiety is more frequent than pure joy. These claims are (I hope) made due statistical analysis of huge samples, and were even used to create a theory of dreams (another one of the many we have). Like Melanieb said, you're lucky I also haven't had many nightmares, but my dreams are mostly filled with anxiety, fear, and pain (emotionally). The non-negative ones are mostly about exploration.

[Arra]

I rarely have actual 'nightmares', but I'm usually facing some dilemma, or there's some sort of problem, and of course that's going to be stressful in a way. I think it happens because that's how we think in real life. People fixate on problems. That's the purpose of thinking. If we had no problems then there would be little to think about - we'd just be basking in happiness. Even for someone who's generally happy, they're still going to think about their minor problems, even if they aren't a big deal. And we tend to dream about things that are actually important to us, long-term. Because those things are so important to us, they're going to be our biggest problems, so I can see nightmares arising.

[ImBored]

For example, more often you in a position of confrontation, than meeting with your date. Anxiety is more frequent than pure joy. Yes exactly, I'm not even talking about full fledged nightmares, just dreams with confrontations, or situations that cause anxiety or stress; I rarely have those. Most of my dreams are pretty passive emotionally, or even happy dreams. Which apparently isn't the norm. And I'm not one of those people that likes to consider themselves significantly "different" from other people (like they're something special), those types of people annoy me. But I can honestly say that I rarely have bad dreams.

[melanieb]

Consider also that in dreams we connect to the emotions that are most irrational and hidden inside us. The normal conscious inhibitions are turned off. The ability to "tune out" unnecessary sounds and feelings is no longer present. I think our brain's lack of ability to inhibit these unnecessary or irrational emotions while dreaming accounts for the increase in negative dreams. As for how we change that...one theory is as good as the next. It will all come down to the individual.

[JoannaB]

I think one person's nightmare is another person's cool dream: a lot of it is in the dreamer's interpretation. Three of the coolest dreams that I have had in the past month could all be considered nightmare's by someone else reading my journal entries: in one I woke up in fear of being squished by a helicopter and felt compelled to quickly move out of the way even after waking, another featured a gruesome murder but the dream was actually a metaphorical dream for something else and all the pieces fit with my interpretation in a nifty way, and in another dream I was distressed about not knowing where I lived and an iPhone that had an endless series of Exit menus. None of these dreams were nightmares for me, even though the emotions they elicited were not all good and rainbow colored, but the fact of how vivid and cool they were trumped that by far for me. On the other hand a dream of my asking a coworker out on a date was a nightmare after the fact because I was upset about having that dream, even though during that dream I felt no negative emotions and was oblivious to anything being wrong. It was my interpretation that made it a personal nightmare.