Psychologist Dr Ian Wallace Analyses Our Dreams

Psychologist Dr Ian Wallace Analyses Our Dreams

From social media to emails on our smartphones, it’s never been easier to stay connected to work. However, the always-on culture is having a huge impact on work-life balance – affecting our personal lives and making it difficult to switch off from the pressure.

Work experiences are invading our subconscious, causing us to stress so much that we lose hours of sleep and linger on work concerns even while resting. For employers, it adds up to an increasingly tired and less productive workforce.

But just how hard is it for workers to free themselves from this culture? And what effect is it having on the quality and quantity of our sleep? To find out, totaljobs teamed up with psychologist Dr Ian Wallace to ask 2,000 people about their dreams and nightmares about work.

After analysing the survey data, here’s what Dr Wallace found out about the contents of dreams and nightmares, and his simple tips and advice for getting a good night’s sleep…

What is a dream?

What do we know about these thoughts and images that happen while we sleep? Well, they are not a random occurrence. A dream is how we naturally resolve the accumulated emotional tension from all the information and experiences we unconsciously absorb every day.

Dreams give us meaningful insights into specific challenges we’re encountering daily. They raise a problem and draw on past experiences to help us understand how we can make the most of future opportunities.

The survey shows just how far work is invading our dreams and affecting the people we work with. We’re just as likely to dream about our colleagues as our family (34% of respondents compared to 35%) and even more so than our personal relationships or money.