Most people have nightmares, but some people have the same nightmare over and over again for a while, leaving them restless for most of the day. Recurring nightmares can trigger the thought of sleeping the next night to create anxiety. For many, nightmares are of little importance: after childhood, the anguish caused by bad dreams is just a minor inconvenience; But frequent and deeply distressing nightmares are a very serious thing, so intense and disturbing that they can paralyze the individual. With this Psychology-Online article we will try to understand why do you have recurring nightmares and what can we do about it when we suffer them.
Index
- Types of nightmares
- Why do we have recurring nightmares
- What Recurring Nightmares Mean
- Relationship between anxiety and dreams
Types of nightmares.
The nightmares in adults they are terrifying content dreams accompanied by feelings such as fear, anxiety, but also anger, sadness, disgust and other
Nightmares tend to appear in the early hours of dawn and are characterized by full consciousness upon awakening and for him vivid memory of the content of the terrifying experience. The duration of the event is generally short, 4-15 minutes, but often after the episode the subject may have difficulty falling back to sleep. In general terms, we can distinguish two categories of nightmares:
- Ordinary nightmares: they are the ones that develop a terrifying story, sometimes influenced by watching movies or reading; are often linked to REM sleep phase And waking up from these dreams brings remarkable relief and the feeling of being safe in reality.
- Post-traumatic nightmares: it is the proper category of those who have suffered terrible events, episodes of violence, etc. Victims of similar events do indeed tend to have recurring dreams, in which they often relive the fact suffered in reality (with some dream distortion), which often re-traumatizes the dreamer; the horror experienced is the same as that experienced in reality, even after years. They can occur in any phase of sleep (not just REM) and even appear as flashbacks during wakefulness. This type of nightmares in adults are a symptom of post traumatic stress disorder.
Why do we have recurring nightmares.
What are the causes of nightmares according to psychology? Most children experience nightmares that they later forget about the day; childhood nightmares, especially those that manifest themselves in younger children, have no pathological significance. The adult nightmaresInstead, they are often characterized by links with reality, and although they have a tendency to have psychopathological disorders, there is no unanimous consensus among sleep experts on what the psychopathology in question is.
Vivid and recurring nightmares sometimes precede the onset of a psychosis. Recurring nightmares also occur in the setting of other psychiatric problems, particularly the anxiety and the posttraumatic stress. However, most nightmares in adults can be an expected - and therefore normal - reaction to stress, and some doctors believe they help people work through their traumatic experiences.
What do recurring nightmares mean?
The recurring nightmares can be recognized as a form of psychiatric illness and the criteria for the diagnosis of nightmare disorder are set by both the APA and the WHO: when someone has long and terrifying dreams of this kind, or suffers from daytime sleepiness, irritability, or loss of concentration, a diagnosis of nightmares. Usually, nightmares have to do with something that threatens our security and self-esteem, but to better understand their meaning, we first have to make a distinction:
- Isolated nightmare: often expresses the unconscious elaboration of a recent malaise, event or situation.
- Recurring nightmare: expresses a psyche locked in a fort danger or deep, but haunting, transformation.
The most recognized psychological hypothesis for the explanation of nightmares is that through dreams the unconscious tries to bring out contents that the rational conscience does not want to see or deny at all. To do this, he uses a symbolic language with strong overtones that does not allow us to continue with the habitual apparent indifference, "attacking" us just when we are at maximum abandonment, that is, during the dream.
In fact, for analytical psychology, nightmares are important dreams that seem to contain messages to be understood: they tend to transmit to the dreamer a message, the need to change the conscious attitude or to make something new grow in one's own experience of lifetime; Sometimes they can warn of a workplace, relationship, or person to avoid. You can see more information on the subject in this article on The interpretation of dreams.
Relationship between anxiety and dreams.
Especially in childhood, nightmares can reflect anxiety and insecurity: in addition to being very frequent, it is known that in children there is a association between bad dreams and anxiety disorders, which is why nightmares are often called sleep anxiety dreams or sleep anxiety attacks.
Haynes and Mooney (1975) offered the intriguing theory that nightmares, especially recurring nightmares, play a role. anxiety reduction function, since this decrease is due to repeated cognitive exposure to stimuli that produce fear. However, based on a series of studies, they concluded that their data had been explained very thrifty way considering nightmares simply as a manifestation and related to anxiety.
On the other hand, in a recent publication of 2018, researchers from the Universities of Turku and Skövde noted that calmer people in the waking state may have more positive dreams, while what those who live with more anxiety process more negative dreams. In fact, it was found that people with higher rates of peace of mind reported more positive dream emotions, while people with higher levels of anxiety spoke from "negative" emotions (unpleasant) in dreams.
How to eliminate recurring nightmares? To sleep peacefully it would be necessary to abandon this state of continuous tension. In this article you will find guidelines for managing stress, among which mindfulness and relaxation techniques stand out. You can start practicing them with the following video.
We recommend going to a psychologist to carry out an evaluation of your case and determine if you have nightmare disorder in adults. In which case, the professional will accompany you with a personalized treatment.
This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
If you want to read more articles similar to Why do you have recurring nightmares, we recommend that you enter our category of Clinical psychology.
Bibliography
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- Sikka, P., Pesonen, H., Revonsuo, A. (2018). Peace of mind and anxiety in the waking state are related to the affective content of dreams. Scientifica Reports, 8 (12762).
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