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Ernest Hartman gives us some convincing answers to the age old questions of What is a nightmare? Who has them? How and why do they occur? Hartman is a well known sleep researcher and professor of psychiatry at Tufts University.
In this book he discusses the results of studies that he and his colleagues conducted on almost 100 individuals who experienced frequent nightmares. Most individuals experience a nightmare once or twice a year, whereas only one person out of two hundred experiences frequent nightmares. Those experiencing frequent nightmares were given a special battery of psychological tests and an in-depth interview with at least one psychiatrist. The study also included two other groups for comparison, these were so-called ordinary dreamers and vivid dreamers. The frequent nightmare group proved to have very different characteristics from the vivid and ordinary dreamers.
The frequent nightmare group had considerably more psychopathology. Although they were not diagnosed as being schizophrenics, their psychopathology pointed in that direction. Their personalities showed an openness and a lack of defensiveness. This made them emotionally vulnerable to stress and exceedingly sensitive to certain stimuli. They tended to be too trusting and unprepared for dangerous situations. They were easily hurt but also capable of great empathy towards others.
The frequent nightmare subjects had “thin or permeable boundaries.” They do not rigidly pigeonhole the contents of their environment. A child normally learns to differentiate between himself and others, between fantasy and reality, and between the dreaming and waking states. This leads to the formation of mental partitions or boundaries that can be thin and fluid or thick and rigid. An individual with thin boundaries easily becomes involved with another person and is prone to become overinvolved in personal relationships.
Individuals with thin boundaries show this permeability between the sleeping and waking states. They a