In the moments after a nightmare, it can take seconds or minutes to calm the nervous system and either go back to sleep or prepare for the day ahead. Having a nightmare isn’t so different than facing fear while awake: during a nightmare, heart rate skyrockets, people sweat more and breathe more heavily, and the body releases fight-or-flight hormones - adrenaline and norepinephrine. If people feel like they can cope with the overwhelming emotion, they tend to label the experience a “bad dream” - not a full-on nightmare. What defines a nightmare is whether the dreamer feels like they can’t handle it, she says. They can overwhelm the dreamer with feelings of rage, sadness and disgust. Garden variety nightmares aren’t always fear-based, Barrett tells Inverse. Post-traumatic nightmares can be extremely upsetting, forcing the person to relive traumatic events over and over. Garden variety nightmares are different than night terrors, which occur in non-REM sleep and typically diminish with age, and post-traumatic nightmares, which cut across sleep cycles and can be more like a flashback of real events, than a dream. Nightmares often revolve around risk of death or injury, loss of control, or a stressful event- maybe a killer is chasing you down a dark hallway, you’re facing an exam without preparation, or you’re driving your car the wrong way on the interstate. They also often tag nightmares as dreams that wake you up suddenly. Some scientists define them as highly dysphoric dreams involving intense negative emotions which occur during late-night REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. Nightmares are dreams that cause overwhelming fear. If you have nightmares occasionally, that’s a really good opportunity to understand a little bit more about unconscious fears Night Terrors For people dealing with post-traumatic nightmares, these scary dreams do more psychological harm than good.īut for people who have a nightmare or two every month, it’s worth exploring how waking up in a cold sweat with your heart racing might present an opportunity to improve mental health and understand ourselves better. Nightmares can still cause distress and kick off a cycle of anxiety and sleep deprivation, which leads to more nightmares - a stressful merry-go-round that can make people fearful of falling asleep. “So if you just have garden variety nightmares occasionally, that’s a really good opportunity to understand a little bit more about unconscious fears and anxieties that may be cropping up.” “Interpreting our dreams often makes us understand something about what we’re thinking or feeling that we haven’t been conscious of,” Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of Trauma and Dreams, tells Inverse. Nightmares could help relieve stress, prepare for real-life threats, and provide insight into suppressed emotions, say experts. But what happens when these frightening activities show up in our dreams? Nightmares may seem totally negative, but research suggests they may have a few surprising benefits. Spooky season means horror movie marathons, haunted houses, and maybe even a ghost tour.
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