• Posted April 20, 2026

Dreams Affect Your Morning Mood In Surprising Ways, Study Finds

Bad dreams can affect your morning mood, but not if a little joy is sprinkled into your slumber, a new study says.

People who had dreams filled with fear were more likely to be in a rotten mood the following morning, researchers recently reported in the journal Sleep.

But if their dreams mixed fear and joy, sleepers had 20% higher odds of waking with a placid state of mind, the study found.

Interestingly, people who were better at managing their emotions tended to have higher levels of fear in their dreams, and even worse moods the following morning, researchers found.

“We found two different results,” lead researcher Garrett Baber, a doctoral student at the University of Kansas, said in a news release.

“On the day-to-day level, more fear in dreams was associated with worse mood in the morning,” Baber said. “However, people who reported using more adaptive emotion regulation strategies — such as acceptance rather than suppression — showed higher levels of fear in their dreams on average.”

For the new study, researchers analyzed dream reports from more than 500 people, comparing emotions in those dreams to the participants’ emotional state the next morning.

“The idea I’ve been most interested in was whether emotions in our dreams have any impact on our emotions in the day,” Baber said. 

“We’re in a safe environment in our dreams. We cannot technically be harmed. If all goes wrong in a dream, we wake up,” he explained. “As long as sleep is not really disrupted, if it’s not rising to the level of a nightmare, fear in our dreams might actually help us better deal with our emotions in the day.”

However, results showed that fear actually caused people to wake in a bad mood, with results even more pronounced among people who are better able at managing their emotions.

Researchers also looked at joy in dreams. 

“We examined whether emotional complexity — experiencing multiple emotions at once — had any effect,” Baber added.

“We found when dreams contained both fear and joy at the same time, people were less likely to report negative mood in the morning,” he said. “This was a novel finding. It suggests that emotional complexity in dreams may have a protective effect.”

However, it’s hard to say when a dream starts to affect our emotions, Baber said.

“There is no consensus on when emotional processing happens,” he said. “Early work assumed it occurs during the dream itself. I am testing whether it may be more important how dreams affect us later in the day.”

While this study focused on morning, the effects may actually unfold much later.

“An emerging theory suggests that changes within the dream itself may reflect emotional regulation," Baber said. "The presence of both fear and joy may be an example of this.”

Researchers next plan to study potential differences between nightmares and bad dreams.

“Nightmares are typically defined as dreams that are so distressing they wake the person up, versus bad dreams where the person remains asleep,” Baber said. “There are effective therapies for chronic nightmares, particularly for people with PTSD, where nightmares about traumatic experiences are common. There may be nuance in whether some forms of distressing dreams represent the brain trying to process emotions.”

In other words, nightmares might challenge a person’s mental and physical health, while simple bad dreams might be a sign of brain resilience, he said.

More information

The American Psychological Association has more on nightmares in adults.

SOURCES: University of Kansas, news release, April 14, 2026; Sleep, March 13, 2026