As described in a recent NPR interview with Dr. Helene Emsellem, a number of simple behavioral changes can improve people’s chances of a good night’s sleep. And an op-ed essay in the New York Times a couple weeks ago by Nancy Kalish made a strong case for high schools starting their first classes later in the morning, to allow teenagers an extended opportunity for the psychophysiological benefits of sleep. These are good ideas, and they can help soften the anti-sleep pressures of the modern world.

The findings I present in American Dreamers point to something not mentioned in recent media discussions of sleep deprivation, and that’s the impact of economic anxiety on sleep. Although my primary focus is on the political dimensions of dreaming, I quickly realized as I did the research that people on both sides of the partisan divide are deeply worried about their financial circumstances. Their economic anxieties haunted their sleep, diminishing the amount and quality of their nightly slumber and brooding over their dreams in the form of work- and money-related nightmares.

In recent days global stock markets have dropped sharply on fears of a U.S. recession. If indeed we are heading into a major economic downturn, I predict a corresponding rise in national sleep disturbances as Americans become more and more anxious about their money problems. That raises the specter of a vicious cycle for people at the lower end of the income scale: The effects of sleep deprivation include loss of physical coordination, mental sharpness, and emotional self-control, all of which diminish an individual’s ability to function effectively in our economic system.

I have no magic wands to wave, but I do believe our best hope lies in the power of creative imagination, expressed in both dreaming and waking—the ability to look beyond the gloomy, dispiriting difficulties of the present to envision a better future in which the economy supports and sustains the people, not the other way around.

Dr. Kelly Bulkeley, author of American Dreamers: What Dreams Tell Us about the Political Psychology of Conservatives, Liberals, and Everyone Else, is a visiting scholar at the Graduate Theological Union and a faculty member in the dream studies program at John F. Kennedy University. A former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, his other books include Dreaming Beyond Death: A Guide to Pre-Death Dreams and Visions, Dreams: A Reader on the Religious, Cultural, and Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming; Dreams of Healing: Transforming Nightmares into Visions of Hope; and The Wondering Brain: Thinking about Religion with and beyond Cognitive Neuroscience.