Dream Experiences in Alexithymia

Abstract

Alexithymia is a disorder, which has a significant impact on one’s ability to have an insight into their own emotional states, making it impossible to identify and understand the information coming from experienced emotions. Alexithymia consists of the following symptoms: difficulty in identifying and verbalizing emotions, difficulty in distinguishing between emotions and the bodily sensations, external, operational way of thinking, as well as impaired creativity. This way of functioning can have a significant impact on experiencing stress – existing research suggest that people with alexithymia experience prolonged negative affect in face of stress, probably because of the inability to regulate their own emotions, as well as dysfunctional stress regulatory mechanisms. Because of the mentioned symptoms of alexithymia, it is interesting to explore the way of experiencing dreams in alexithymia, such as: dream recall frequency, experiencing nightmares, sleep paralysis and lucid dreams. The existing literature, focused on exploring this relation, is minimal, yet has shown that alexithymia has a significant impact on dream recall frequency, as well as experiencing nightmares. Research also suggests that there are significant relations between high levels of perceived stress and nightmare experiences, as well as sleep paralysis.