Nightmares About Your Partner? They Actually Affect Your Relationship
LatestYou already know this: Say one dark and stormy night, you have a weird/bad dream where your partner is not only doing something insanely shitty, like having sex with your best friend right in front of you, but is also laughing maniacally as you weep tears of shock/deep devastation. The next morning you look over at the jackal who so enthusiastically wounded you the night before, and think, the fuck if I’m getting him a coffee this morning. In other words, weird/bad dreams make you feel weird/bad. So you act weird/bad, too. But now science has your back.
“People’s activity changes as a function of the dream they had the night before – specifically within the realm of their close relationships.”
That validating gem comes courtesy of lead researcher Dylan Selterman at the University of Maryland, who conducted a study of 61 people’s relationships between their dreams and their, well, relationships. He had them keep dream journals for a few weeks, and log their activities, and measure the quality of their relationships. The folks in the study were 17 to 42 in age, and were all in committed relationships that had gone on at least six months.
He found that dreams have a “predictive value” in terms of their impact on the relationship. So what’s coming out of your brain while you sleep isn’t just always a benign release — sometimes, it can leak over into the next day and leave your partner with some serious ‘splainin’ to do.
For example, after a dream involving a high degree of jealousy, the dreamer was more likely to report conflict with their partner during the day. Similarly, arguing in dreams was associated with next-day relationship conflict, while dreamer infidelity was linked with reduced feelings of love or intimacy afterward.
Selterman believes these correlations are the result of “priming,” the process by which a stimulus evokes a related response. For instance, previous research has shown that placing someone on a wobbly chair triggers a desire for stable relationship partners.
This mechanism, of course, operates on a largely unconscious level.
Perhaps by dreaming these heinous acts in the first place, your brain is merely responding to the unrest/fear/distrust that already exists in your relationship by pushing it out in your dream state, thereby giving you a reason to discuss it or bring it into the cold, harsh light of day.