- Advise interested patients that dreams tend to reflect emotion, rather than events; and this study shows that a very dramatic event does not produce replays.
- This study was published as an abstract and presented orally at a conference. These data and conclusions should be considered to be preliminary as they have not yet been reviewed and published in a peer-reviewed publication.
SALT LAKE CITY, June 20 — Americans aren't having nightmares—or dreams of any kind—that replay the 9/11 attack on New York, according to sleep researchers.
That is not to say that Americans are ignoring 9/11 in their dreams, said psychiatrist Ernest Hartmann, M.D., of Tufts, in Boston. Instead, the 9/11 event has had the effect of increasing the intensity of imagery in dreams that superficially have nothing to do with airplane attacks on downtown New York.
The intensity of the so-called "central image" of a dream is correlated with the strength of the emotions that underlie the dream, Dr. Hartmann said at Sleep 2006, the joint meeting of the Sleep Research Society and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
The example he gave was that after 9/11 the tidal wave that sweeps one away in a dream is more intense than it was before 9/11. On the other hand, it remains a tidal wave—not a replay of a TV image of an airplane attack on a building.
