Search

Posttraumatic symptoms, including nightmares, are more prevalent in World War II survivors than in the general population, but how war experiences have affected subsequent dream content in specific survivor populations remains less explored. In the present study, we used self-reports collected in 1973 from Polish Auschwitz survivors (W = 150; 45 women) to investigate the prevalence of posttraumatic symptoms, classified according to the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Furthermore, we classified main themes, central emotions, and threatening events in the dreams (W = 632) of the survivors, comparing dreams recalled from before, during, and after the war. Of the respondents, 12.7% described experiencing all diagnostic criteria for PTSD. War-related themes were less common in dreams dreamt before than during the war but were most common after the war. Themes related to family and freedom were most likely to appear in dreams dreamt during than before or after the war. The most often occurring emotion was fear, and dreams from after the war were likely to contain more negative and less positive emotions than dreams dreamt during the war. The likelihoods of reporting threatening events and threats involving aggression were higher in dreams dreamt during than before the war and in dreams dreamt after than during the war. In conclusion, PTSD symptoms were common in Polish Auschwitz survivors 30 years after World War II, and the themes, emotions, and threatening events in their dreams seem to reflect lifelong posttraumatic dreaming. We interpret the results as lending support for the threat simulation theory of dreaming. KEYWORDS: World War II, posttraumatic stress disorder, Auschwitz, dream content analysis, threat simulation theory, Severe traumatic events often lead to posttraumatic symptoms (e.g., Glaesmer, Gunzelmann, Braehler, Forstmeier, & Maercker, 2010; Hartmann, 1996: Schreuder, Kleijn, & Rooijmans, 2000), yet only a minority of people exposed [...]

This study demonstrates that different methods for measuring emotional experiences in dreams--self-ratings of dreams using emotion rating scales versus external ratings in the form of content analysis of narrative dream [...]

The recently proposed threat simulation theory (TST) states that dreaming about threatening events has a biological function. In the past few years, the TST has led to several dream content analysis studies that empirically test the theory. The predictions of the TST have been investigated mainly with a new content analysis system, the Dream Threat Scale (DTS), a method developed for identifying and classifying threatening events in dreams. In this article we review the studies that have tested the TST with the DTS. We summarize and reevaluate the results based on the dreams of Finnish and Swedish university students, traumatized and nontraumatized Kurdish, Palestinian, and Finnish children, and special dream samples, namely recurrent dreams and nightmares collected from Canadian participants. We sum up other recent research that has relevance for the TST and discuss the extent to which empirical evidence supports or conflicts with the TST. New evidence and new direct tests of the predictions of the TST yield strong support for the theory, and the TST's strengths seem to outweigh its weaknesses.