Dream content sometimes changes before any obvious illness symptoms appear, potentially acting like an early warning system. The research suggests that in REM sleep the brain integrates internal bodily signals—errors, distortions, or threats—and represents them metaphorically in dreams, which may help detect or even respond to emerging health problems (Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2025).

This paper investigates the dreams of Ukrainian women who fled to Poland after the Russian invasion, revealing how dreams can play a powerful role in coping with trauma and adapting to new lives. Drawing on interviews with 50 refugees, the study finds that, while many dreams reflect the pain and anxiety of war, a surprising number also serve an adaptive purpose—helping women feel hope, joy, or strength in the face of adversity (International Journal of Dream Research, 2025).

This study examines how two major crises—the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian War—impacted sleep patterns and dreams in Portugal’s general population. Researchers analyzed how these crises shaped dream recall, nightmare frequency, and emotional dream content, revealing key psychological differences between pandemic and war-related dreams.

In a survey of 233 young people in Hong Kong, researchers found that vivid or altered dreams (rich in sensory detail or unusual content) were positively linked with better problem-solving ability. However, frequent or intense dreaming was surprisingly associated with lower resilience, suggesting that the number or strength of dreams may need to be balanced for psychological well-being (International Journal of Dream Research, 2024).

Scientists found that introducing a specific theme right as people fall asleep during the N1 sleep stage—what’s called targeted dream incubation—was shown to boost creativity in tasks related to the incubated theme. Compared to staying awake or dreaming without prompts, participants whose dreaming included those prompts performed better and made more novel, far-reaching associations (Scientific Reports, 2023).

Talking about someone’s dream using a structured discussion format leads people to feel more empathy for the dreamer—especially those who start off with lower levels of empathy. The increase doesn’t depend on how long the dreams or discussions are, and it seems sharing dreams has social benefits beyond their private emotional or memory-processing roles (Dreaming, 2021).

Continuous stress and trauma are manifested in dreams, the study of which expands our knowledge concerning the unconscious reactions to the trauma and the efforts of coping with continuous traumatic situations. Since September 2000, the area of the Gaza envelope in Israel has been under the threat of rocket attacks. Such continuous life-threatening stimuli can be considered complex trauma. In this research, people living near the Gaza Strip were asked to write their dreams and their associations to the dreams during 4 consecutive weeks. Six hundred and nine dreams were collected from 44 women and 18 men (age range 14–62). In another research dreams of Palestinians and Israelis were collected immediately after the last Gaza wars. Differences in dream themes between gender and age groups were found, conveying the depth of psychological experience of living and dreaming under fire.