Group nightmares about escape from ex-homeland

Escape nightmares (recurrent nightmares about re-escaping ex-homeland) were studied via a 79-item questionnaire administered to 83 Czechoslovak refugees who were living in Switzerland. The key features of the nightmare were not related significantly to the refugees' age, gender, occupation, or educational level. Further analyses dealt with mutual relationships of the various reported aspects of the escape nightmares. The reports of dreaming about arrival in the ex-homeland by a “mistake,” such as boarding a wrong airplane (i.e., a Freudian parapraxis), were associated with higher levels of (subsequent) dream anxiety, with waking up due to mounting dream tension, and with the dreamer not knowing at first upon awakening whether he was now in the free world or elsewhere.