The study sheds fresh light on how dream experiences relate to waking distress, suggesting that dream experiences and psychological distress form a tightly interconnected system. Among 389 Italian adults, stress emerged as the most central element in a web linking worry, anxiety and depression, with more worry and depressive symptoms associated with more negative dreams.
Experts have long debated whether dreams mirror people’s emotional lives. The continuity hypothesis of dreaming contends that concerns and feelings from waking life continue into sleep and shape dream experiences, meaning those under pressure may dream of threatening or emotionally intense events.
Despite this idea, researchers note that linking dream experiences to different forms of distress is tricky. Some individuals remember dreams often without being upset by them, while others rarely recall dreams yet feel strongly affected by those they remember. Past work on dreams and worry has often proceeded in parallel rather than in a single, integrated analysis.
The research team was led by Vittorio Lenzo of the University of Catania in Italy. They surveyed 389 Italian-speaking adults recruited through university mailing lists, social media and online blogs. Participants ranged from 18 to 64 years old, with an average age around 24; the sample included 330 women, 50 men and nine non-binary individuals.
Participants completed an online survey containing three questionnaires. The Mannheim Dream Questionnaire asked how often people recalled their dreams, how emotionally intense their dreams were, how negative or positive their dreams usually felt, how often dreams affected daytime mood and how often they told others about their dreams, each measured with a single question.
They also answered the Penn State Worry Questionnaire, which assesses pathological worry—persistent, hard-to-control thoughts about potential future problems—and the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale, which gauges symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress.
Using network analysis, the researchers treated each psychological feature as a node in a network, with connections representing how strongly two features relate after accounting for all others. This method highlights which variables hold the most influence within the network.
On average, participants reported worry at clinically elevated levels relative to normative data. Depression, anxiety and stress formed a closely linked cluster, with the strongest link observed between anxiety and stress. Worry was most strongly associated with stress and only weakly with anxiety and depression, a pattern the authors say may reflect worry’s role in sustaining prolonged tension.
Within the dream measures, those who recalled their dreams more often were also more likely to tell others about them—the strongest connection in the entire network. Frequent dream recall was moderately linked to emotionally intense dreams, which in turn were associated with the sense that dreams affected daytime mood.
Links between dreams and distress were weaker overall. Participants who reported more negative dreams tended to have higher depressive symptoms and greater worry, while dreams perceived as affecting daytime mood were linked to higher anxiety. The researchers note this arrangement fits the continuity hypothesis, with worry potentially carrying vigilance into sleep.
In network terms, stress stood out as the most central variable, meaning it had the strongest overall connections to the other measures, while depression, dream recall and dream intensity were among the least central. Dream emotional tone showed a negative expected influence, indicating its connections to distress tended to run in the opposite direction from those of distress.
The authors concluded that dream experiences are integrated components of a dynamic emotional system. They suggest that more positive dream experiences might help dampen distress, while stress may amplify it. They also propose that worry and depression could lead to more negative dreams, which might, in turn, feed next-day anxiety, though they emphasise the need for longitudinal testing to confirm these ideas.
Several caveats accompany the findings. The data come from a single time point, so the study cannot determine whether dreams influence distress, distress shapes dreams, or both. The sample was a convenience group of mostly young women recruited online, which limits generalisations to broader populations.
All information was self-reported, and dream experiences rely on memory, which may introduce bias. Each dream feature was measured with a single question, and while the network was generally stable under repeated statistical resampling, some connections remained less certain.
The study, titled “Dream experiences and psychological distress: a network analysis of pathological worry, depression, anxiety, and stress,” was conducted by Vittorio Lenzo, Chiara Fioretti, Alessandro Musetti, Raffaele De Luca Picione, Christian Franceschini, Patrizia Strano, Maria C. Quattropani and Alberto Sardella.
