Looking for a reason for recurring nightmares , like leaving the house without your pants? Forget Freudian explanations. According to new research, the Earth’s magnetic field is to blame. Darren Lipnicki, a psychologist formerly of the Center for Space Medicine in Berlin, Germany, has found a correlation between the wildest dreams and extreme geomagnetic activity records, according to the journal New Scientist.
Between 1990 and 1997, Lipnicki kept a meticulous record of each night’s dreams, amassing a total of 2,387 entries during her teenage years. “I always wanted to do science with them,” he said. And it has. Specifically, Lipnicki analyzed daily geomagnetic activity in Perth, Australia, where he lived at the time. Using a scale called the k-index , which quantifies local geomagnetic activity, he identified 66 days of low geomagnetic activity and 70 days of high activity. By comparing the figures with his records, Lipnicki discovered a clear statistical correlation between his most outlandish and unreal dreams and geomagnetic activity : the rarest dreams occurred on days with low geomagnetic activity.
Although Lipnicki recognizes that this study is not enough to say that the earth’s magnetic activity decides whether we will dream of a quiet day in the park or it will be something more like an LSD trip, he hopes that it can serve as a starter for a more in-depth investigation.
Previous research had already linked low geomagnetic activity to an increase in the production of melatonin , the hormone that regulates our circadian rhythm.
