The present study examined the relationship of sexual abuse to nightmare frequency and related sleep disturbance. Subjects were 539 undergraduate women, who completed a Nightmare/Sleep History Questionnaire, Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) and a questionnaire which inquired into histories of "unwanted sexual activity" and physical abuse. Based on their self report 124 women reported a history of some form of sexual abuse, 71 reported physical abuse and 344 no abuse. Analyses of covariance controlling for depression, found that the two abuse groups had higher nightmare and night terror frequency, and had greater difficulty returning to sleep after awakening from a nightmare.

There exist two perspectives which have examined the concept of bizarreness in sleep mentation. One perspective holds that most dreams are bizarre whereas the other view holds that most are mundane. However, neither one of these perspectives haveadequately considered the issue of bizarreness in nightmares. To fulfill a course requirement, 43 university students from a first year psychology course were asked to record one home-recalled dream and two home-recalled nightmares (one "typical" nightmare and one "worst" nightmare). Two bizarreness scales were used to analyze the 129 sleep mentation reports for bizarreness. There was no support for the hypothesis that "worst" nightmares would possess the most bizarreness. When the length of dreams and nightmares was held constant no differences were found in bizarreness or realism. The finding that bizarreness is not a feature common to all dream reports is not consistent with the activation-synthesis hypothesis.

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The purpose of this study was to examine raters' abilities to detect a history of sexual abuse from nightmare reports. Seventy-five university students were given 28 nightmare reports from women: 14 reporting a history of sexual abuse and 14 reporting no abuse. The students were randomly assigned to three instruction conditions: one group was given no information about the characteristics of sexual abuse reports, while two groups were given either brief or expanded descriptions. The raters were then asked to make a judgment about whether or not each dreamer had been sexually abused. Following this task, they completed a questionnaire concerning demographic information and their own experiences with sexua~ physical and/or emotional abuse. In general, raters were able to sort the nightmare reports at a level well above chance. Furthermore, instruction condition and characteristics of the raters were unrelated to accuracy. However, most raters underestimated the number of abuse reports, with men showing greater underestimation than women. The overall results indicate that even single reports of nightmares can yield clues to a dreamer's reported history. However, they cannot be used as a "diagnostic test," given the rates of both false positive and false negative errors.

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