The role of nocturnal dreams in performance and recovery of athletes

Athletes often dream about their sport. This is not surprising, but exactly what the continuity hypothesis in dream research predicts: Dreams reflect thoughts and actions that a person experiences during wakefulness. Moreover, the content of dreams has an impact on waking life: Distressing dreams and nightmares can tremendously worsen daytime mood, but dreams can also have positive effects on performance in wakefulness. This chapter will focus on sports-related dreams and which role they might play in the context of performance and recovery of athletes. For this purpose, in the first part of this chapter we will introduce some basics methods of dream research and how dreams are analysed. In the second part, interesting areas where dream research and sport science are closely intertwined are presented. In the third part, we will focus on dreams, in which the dreamer is aware of the dream state (called lucid dream) and in which he is able to execute complex actions within the dream.