WELCOME TO MY NIGHTMARE

Do you have a lot of bad dreams? Well, so does almost everybody else.

Research conducted by University of Arizona psychologists James Wood and Richard
Bootzin suggests that nightmares occur quite frequently, at least among young
adults. In addition, nightmares increase during stressful times. And contrary
to other reports, the researchers claim that the frequency of these scary dreams
does not help to indicate the presence of a psychiatric disorder.

During a 1990 study, Wood and Bootzin asked 220 undergraduates to keep a daily
dream log for two weeks. Judging from these records, the average student has 24
nightmares a year, more than twice as many as previously thought. (In prior
analyses, subjects estimated the number of nightmares they had.) Chronically
anxious people, it seems, don't have more nightmares than less worried people,
but they may be more likely to remember them.

In a 1992 study of 89 students, Wood and Bootzin found that during particularly
stressful periods, the probability of having a nightmare doubles. These
findings correlate with their analysis of students living in the San Francisco
area in the first few weeks following the 1989 earthquake. Those students
suffered twice as many nightmares, on average, as their contemporaries in
Tucson. However, Wood says, "we still don't know whether people exposed to
traumatic stress are more susceptible to nightmares in the long run."

Indeed, many questions about nightmares have yet to be analyzed in a systematic
way. "There have almost been fewer studies on nightmares than sequels about the
ones on Elm Street," Wood says.