Is This How You Get More Nightmares?

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There's a common notion that waking up on the wrong side of the bed makes a person grumpy and irritable. However, sleeping on the wrong side might also cause discomfort and likely give you nightmares.

Van Winkle's reported that your sleeping position could affect the quality of your sleep and influence your dreams. Noting a study from 2004 entitled "Sleeping Position, Dream Emotions and Subjective Sleep Quality," researchers were able to determine that nightmares often occur among sleepers who lie down on their left side.

The study was conducted among 63 participants and, of this group, 41 were asked to sleep on their left side and 22 on their right side. The participants were also asked to write down their experiences in a daily journal and answer a questionnaire based on the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. Researchers found out that 41 percent of those who slept on the left wrote often about their nightmares compared to only 15 percent from the right-side sleepers, per The Huffington Post.

"Our preliminary observations indicate that dreaming and sleep quality are associated with underlying brain functions and may be affected by body posture," the researchers wrote in their paper. However, the study had some limitations because it was conducted among a small group of subjects and the data was self-reported.

While the 2004 study's accuracy and validity needs to be further researched as the study authors suggested, another research conducted by Dr. Calvin Kai-Ching Yu and published on the journal of the American Psychological Association in 2012 also delved into the influences of sleep positions and dreams.

Yu found out that people who slept with their faces down or prone position experienced more vivid dreams than any other sleeping position. He had 670 participants for his research, who claimed to have had erotic dreams about celebrities or dreams of being locked up, tied, trapped or smothered.

"This effect cannot be fully explained by personality factors, which are merely weakly associated with sleep position," the doctor concluded in his report.

If you're dreading nightmares or if you're simply curious about experiencing vivid dreams, then perhaps changing your sleep position based on these studies could help. Resist sleeping on your left side to avoid bad dreams, or fall asleep with your face down so that you'll have better chances of dreaming with more intensity.

As dream experts suggested, keeping a dream journal can be a tool to help decode the dream's meanings, per University of Kentucky.