by Denis Storey – Psychiatrist.com –
Nightmares can be an effective muse for horror writers – and a burden for the rest of us. But they also might just be a warning from our bodies, one we commonly overlook.
New research – which Abidemi Otaiku, MD, Clinical Research Fellow at the UK Dementia Research Institute presented at the European Academy of Neurology (EAN) Congress 2025 – suggests they could be a canary in the coal mine of our mortality.
In what he described as the first major study of its kind, Otaiku and his team found that adults who suffer weekly nightmares were more than three times as likely to die before the age of 75. That’s compared to those who rarely or never have to wake up from those bad dreams.
