The Study Of The Relationship Between Nightmare And Mental Health On Undergraudates

It's well known that, since the birth of Psychodynamics, the analysis of dream has become one of the most significant activities in psychological counseling and the research of dream in psychological field has entered the age of becoming scientific.Nightmare is typical in human's dreams. Although Freud, the founder of dream research, avoided the scheme on nightmare in his initial theories, nightmare as well as other typical dreams(such as soaring, doing examination, sex related behaviors) have been the earliest subjects for dream researchers. Foucsing on what is nightmare, how nightmare happens and whether the nightmare has something to do with mental health, theorists have given different explanations and abundant correlated researches have been made.This paper studies the nightmare and is established on Chinese undergraduates under Chinese background, expecting to explore the psychological meanings hiding in nightmares by answering the question of what the relationship is between nightmare and mental health.In this paper, 237 undergraduate students from four universities in Shanghai and Jiujiang are selected as study subjects and the reports of their latest nightmares are collected. On the basis of coding and analyzing these reports with Hall/ Van de Castle coding system, the characteristics of these nightmares as well as the metal meanings behind the nightmares are disclosed by contrasting the nightmares with the norm.The correlation between nightmare distress and mental health is also studied in the paper. Through investigation and analysis using Nightmare Questionnaire, the research finds there is a definite connection between mental damages caused by nightmares and anxiety & depression. The more mental damage the subject suffers, the more anxiety & depression he behaves. Further analysis reveals the anxiety mainly deals with sleep disorder caused by nightmare, while the depression mainly deals with recognition distortion caused by nightmare.In the study's final part, two typical cases of high nightmare distress are interviewed. Meanwhile the common characteristics of nightmare sufferers' mental health are outlined: high anxiety, frequent insomnia and some symptoms of illusion. Further analysis show such characteristics have countless ties with their growing experiences and personalities. Again the close relationship between nightmare and mental health is testified.