Jonas Mathes

SRH Hochschule Heidelberg · Fakultät für Angewandte Psychologie

Background To date, the relationship between frequent nightmares, chronic pain, waking-life distress and sleep quality is still unclear. Previous research has shown that chronic pain patients reported more frequent nightmares and critical life events compared to a control group. Moreover, patients reported pain dreams similar to pain in their wakin...

Nightmares are a substantial burden for sleep quality. Previous studies have shown that traumatic experiences can increase the probability of nightmares, and also waking-life distress can enhance this effect. There is evidence that the intensity of negative dream emotions is more responsible for rating a dream as a nightmare than threatening dream...

Chronic pain is highly related to poor sleep quality. However, there is still a lack of research concerning nightmares and pain in dreams of chronic pain patients. Previous research indicates that chronic pain patients have a high nightmare frequency and a high dream recall ability. Moreover, despite that pain in dreams has been reported rarely, ch...

Being the aggressor in dreams has been investigated relatively sparsely. On the one hand, these kinds of nightmares may represent continuity of aggression in waking-life, but on the other hand, being the aggressor in dreams may compensate failing (suppressed) aggression from waking-life. Two subtypes of aggressor nightmares should thus be distingui...

Former studies have shown that in many Islamic cultures people view dreams as a product of external sources and therefore have a high appreciation towards dreams in their waking life. In contrast, people in Western cultures in general do not value their dreams strongly in their waking life and mostly view them as a product from their inner reality....

In nightmares, the dream-self is mostly the victim, but there are also dreams in which the dream-self is the offender. Little is known yet about these offender-nightmares ; thus, the main goal of the present study was to carry out the frequencies of offender nightmares and to investigate if the dream-self is offending mostly in self-defense and ang...

According to the threat simulation theory, the function of dreams is to rehearse threatening situations, which served an evolutionary advantage for our ancestors. Furthermore, the exposure to waking life threats is thus supposed to lead to an increased occurrence or quality of dream threats. Aims of the study were to investigate differences in the...

Aim of the current research was to newly conceptualize nightmare distress. The special focus was on the appraisal of nightmare distress while applying a theory-driven approach based on Lazarus' transactional model of stress. It was argued that individuals feel the more distressed the more they feel threatened and harmed by their nightmares (primary...

Being the victim of an aggressor in nightmares is quite common for most persons, but there are also nightmares where the dream-self can become the offender. Two studies were conducted in two nonclinical samples of participants with frequent nightmares to investigate the so-called offender-nightmares. Study 1 served to assess the frequency of offend...

According to the Threat Simulation Theory (TST) dreaming has developed, and was maintained during evolution, because its function of rehearsing threats is essential for survival. The present study analyzed 1612 diary dreams reported by 425 participants (mainly psychology students). The study results indicate that threats play an important role in d...

Dreams have always been fascinating and were interpreted according to cultural norms and beliefs. Based on the continuity between waking and dreaming, one would expect that personality traits are related to dream content. In the present study, of the 108 participants, mostly psychology students, 91 reported at least one dream in a dream diary for 1...

Aggressive interactions are common in dreams, even aggression resulting in the death of a dream character. In different student samples, approximately 20% to 35% of the participants reported having dreamed of killing someone at least once in their lives. In nightmare sufferers, this type of dream was related to elevated waking-life aggression. The...

Typical dreams are defined as dreams with similar contents reported by a high percentage of dreamers. Up to now, the frequencies of typical dream themes have been studied with questionnaires, indicating that the rank order of 55 typical dream themes is quite stable over different sample populations. The study presented here is the first to look at...

Typical dreams are defined as dreams with similar contents reported by a high percentage of dreamers. Up to now, the frequencies of typical dream themes have been studied with questionnaires and these have indicated that the rank order of 55 typical dream themes is quite stable over different sample populations. The study presented here is the firs...

Gender differences in dream content have been studied quite extensively. The present study focused on two dream characteristics, the ratio of male and female dream characters and the occurrence of weapons and clothes in dreams. A sample of 1612 diary dreams reported by 425 participants was analyzed using external ratings by a blind judge. Whereas t...