#nightmareawareness — Public Fediverse posts

DATE: September 6, 2026 at 09:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

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TITLE: Survey reveals associations between Big Five personality traits and nightmare coping habits

URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-personality-traits-shape-the-way-we-cope-with-nightmares/

New research indicates that a person’s personality traits might slightly influence how they deal with distressing dreams. People who are more outgoing tend to cope with nightmares by talking about them, while other personality traits show weaker links to specific coping behaviors. The findings were published in the Journal of Sleep Research.

Nightmares are vivid, frightening dreams that usually occur during rapid eye movement sleep. They often cause a person to wake up feeling intense fear that lingers even after they are fully conscious. If these bad dreams cause extreme distress or impair a person’s ability to function during the day, doctors might diagnose them with a nightmare disorder. However, occasional bad dreams are very common in the general population.

Despite the distress they cause, nightmares are rarely treated with specific medical interventions. This leaves many people to find their own ways to manage the experience in their daily lives. The “Big Five” is a well-established psychological model that groups human personality into five broad categories. These categories are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Previous psychological research has shown that these traits affect how people manage daily stress. For instance, people with high levels of neuroticism, a trait associated with experiencing negative emotions, often use avoidant coping strategies. Researchers Julia Wiesenthal and Michael Schredl from Heidelberg University in Germany wanted to understand how the general public copes with nighttime distress. They designed a study to test if these personality traits play a role in selecting specific nightmare coping strategies.

To investigate this question, the researchers conducted an online survey of 411 adults. The participant pool consisted mostly of university psychology students, with an average age of 28. The participants completed standardized questionnaires that measured their personality traits, how often they experienced nightmares, and the level of distress those dreams caused. They also reported their experiences with lucid dreaming, a state where a person becomes aware that they are dreaming while the dream is still happening.

The survey included a section asking participants about eight specific coping strategies. These strategies included talking to someone, avoiding triggers, gathering information, using medication, and seeking professional help. The list also included cognitive techniques like trying to induce lucid dreams or practicing self-administered imagery rehearsal therapy. Imagery rehearsal therapy is a technique where a person writes down their bad dream and rewrites it with a positive ending while awake.

Participants indicated how often they used each strategy and rated how helpful they perceived each one to be. The researchers then used statistical models to look for associations between specific personality traits and coping behaviors. They adjusted their mathematical models to account for factors like the participants’ age, gender, and education levels. The team formulated three main predictions before they began analyzing the survey responses.

They expected that high openness to experience would predict seeking out information about nightmares. They also predicted that high extraversion would predict talking about the dreams, and high neuroticism would predict avoiding situations that might trigger a nightmare. Out of these three initial predictions, only one was supported by the survey data. The results showed a positive link between extraversion and discussing nightmares with others.

People scoring high in openness did not show a tendency to research their nightmares. Similarly, people with high levels of neuroticism were not more likely to avoid potential nightmare triggers. The study did reveal several secondary associations through exploratory data analysis. For example, people with higher neuroticism scores were slightly more likely to seek professional help for their dreams.

Participants who scored high in openness were somewhat more likely to practice self-administered imagery rehearsal therapy. They were also more likely to document their dreams by writing them down or drawing them. Agreeable individuals showed a slight preference for discussing their nightmares with friends or family. These agreeable participants were also less likely to practice lucid dreaming techniques to control their bad dreams.

Looking at overall habits across all personality types, discussing nightmares was the most common coping strategy. Participants also rated talking about their dreams as the most helpful approach. Avoiding potential triggers was the second most common method used by the respondents. Strategies like practicing lucid dreaming, seeking information, and rewriting the dream’s ending were used far less frequently.

Seeking professional help was quite rare among the participants in the survey. However, the small number of people who did consult a professional rated it as a highly helpful strategy. Using medication for nightmares was the least common approach reported. In line with the lack of medical evidence for treating regular nightmares with drugs, no participants rated medication as very helpful.

The researchers also noticed demographic differences in how people viewed the effectiveness of these strategies. Female participants tended to find talking about their nightmares more helpful than male participants did. Conversely, male participants rated lucid dreaming as a more effective coping tool than female participants did. Older participants generally found both discussing nightmares and rewriting dream endings to be less helpful than younger participants did.

The study relies on self-reported survey data collected at a single point in time. This type of research design means the results cannot prove that a specific personality trait causes a person to choose a certain coping mechanism. The data only shows that the personality traits and the coping behaviors are statistically related. People might also be biased in their survey responses, such as rating a strategy as highly effective simply because they use it often.

Because the participants were mostly university psychology students, their behavior might not represent how the broader public handles bad dreams. The study also measured perceived helpfulness rather than tracking actual changes in nightmare frequency over time. Future studies would need to track participants over a longer period to see if these coping strategies actually reduce the occurrence of nightmares.

Researchers might also assign specific coping techniques to different groups of people to better measure their true effectiveness. Assessing how coping mechanisms work in people formally diagnosed with nightmare disorders could also provide better guidance for medical treatments. Until then, these findings offer a preliminary look at how human personality shapes the way we handle nighttime fears.

The study, “Nightmare Coping Strategies and Their Association With Big Five Personality Traits,” was authored by Julia Wiesenthal and Michael Schredl.

URL: https://www.psypost.org/how-personality-traits-shape-the-way-we-cope-with-nightmares/

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