The Impact of Stress on Dream Content

Authors

• Tessa Duncan, St. Mary's University
• Mason Trevino, St. Mary's University

Files

Contributor

Pierucci, Jillian (Faculty mentor)

Digital Publisher

Digital Commons at St. Mary's University

Publication Date

Spring 2026

Keywords

Impact, Stress, Dreams, Mental Health

Description

• This research investigated how daily stress levels influence the intensity of dreams. The study aimed to clarify the relationship between stress and dream intensity, enhancing understanding of stress’s broader effects on mental health. • Building on Rush’s concept of a “goldilocks zone” in the stress scale, where moderate stress benefits well-being while too little or too much stress can cause harm (2024). The current study used the hallucination model of dreaming from Gillespie and Trakas (2024), which views dreams as vivid, perception-like experiences that can amplify emotions. Drawing on Gessert’s methods for measuring stress and nightmare frequency, stress is defined as the psychological and physiological reactions to uncontrollable events, and dreams as hallucination-like reflections of waking emotions (2023).

Format

pdf

Size

1 poster

City

San Antonio, Texas

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.