Austrians Suffer More from Nightmares

Courtney Bolstad from the Aging Research Center in Birmingham, Alabama, USA, and his co-authors from 16 countries, including the Viennese psychologist Brigitte Holzinger, a board member of the Austrian Society for Sleep Medicine, recently published their study in the "Journal of Sleep Research". A total of 15,854 people aged between 18 and 99 participated in the study as part of a Covid-19 sleep research project.

"Haunted" by Dreams

The average age was around 42 years, with 69.9 percent of participants being women. The sample from Austria included 798 people. Participants were asked to indicate whether they currently (2021) had dream memories and/or nightmares and how this was in 2019 (before the pandemic). Dream episodes remembered once a week or more were classified as frequent. The same applied to nightmares.

The main results for all respondents were summarized by the authors as follows: "In 2021, 54 percent of participants had a memory of dreams weekly or more often. This was 2.9 percentage points more than in 2019 (51.1 percent; note). In 2021, this was most common in Brazil with 68.3 percent, and least common in Germany (39.1 percent)."

For Austria, a proportion of 60 percent of respondents with frequent memories of dream episodes upon waking in 2021 was recorded. For the year 2019, 56.1 percent reported such experiences.

Many More Nightmares

There was also a change in the frequency of nightmares. In the entire sample, nightmares were reported weekly or more often by eleven percent of participants in 2021. This was 4.1 percentage points more than in 2019 (6.9 percent). Brazil had the highest rate with a frequency of nightmares of 19 percent in 2021, while the lowest rate was in Israel (3.4 percent).

In Austria, 13.7 percent of study participants reported a current frequency of nightmares (once a week or more) in 2021. For 2019, they reported a frequency of 5.8 percent.

At least regarding the memory of "experienced" dream episodes, there was a dependency on sleep duration. The highest values in the entire sample were for more than nine hours of sleep (71.4 percent/2021; less than six hours: 51 percent). People with an average sleep duration of six to nine hours had fewer nightmares.

(APA/Red.)

This article has been automatically translated, read the original article here.