Dreaming Nightmares

Unlike standard nightmares, it can be difficult to wake up a person who is experiencing night terrors. When they do wake up, typically they will not remember much about their dream. Nightmares are most common in children. Typically, children start having nightmares before the age of Some may start having bad dreams as young as 3 or 4 years old.

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Adults can also have nightmares, although they do not usually have them as often as children. About 50 percent of all adults claim to have bad dreams on occasion. Interestingly, women experience nightmares more often than men. Scientists know very little about nightmares and dreams. However, there are many different theories about what causes a nightmare. One theory has to do with the anatomy and physiology of the brain. REM sleep stimulates regions in the brain that are used for learning. During REM sleep, the brain fires various different signals at random. If this theory is correct, then nightmares and dreams have no deeper meaning.

They are simply a side effect of deep sleep. Only during sleep, when the conscious mind is silent, do these repressed emotions come to the surface and manifest themselves as nightmares and dreams. This theory implies that all dreams are significant and that they all have some sort of underlying meaning.

To find out what that meaning is, you must interpret your dream. Nightmares can also be a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. Examples of physical trauma include surgery, a car accident or a history of physical abuse. Emotional trauma can include the loss of a loved one, assault, neglect, sexual or emotional abuse. There have been many reported cases of people who repress memories of childhood abuse. They have no recollection of the abuse, but after many years, they begin to have nightmares.

When they seek counseling because of the nightmares, their repressed memories start to come to the surface. Similarly, stress and anxiety are a common cause of bad dreams. More than half of all nightmares occur around the time of a major life event, such as starting at a new school, changing careers or having a child. Other common causes of nightmares are entirely physical. There is also a theory that some people may have a genetic predisposition to nightmares. In other words, nightmares may run in your family.

What are some common symbols in nightmares? Some people believe that nightmares and dreams have a deeper meaning and that they can symbolize your subconscious emotions. Dream interpreters suggest that these elements symbolize something specific. Some symbols are self-explanatory. A bad dream about falling means you feel powerless or out of control, or that you are afraid of failing at something.

A nightmare about drowning means you feel overwhelmed by your emotions. Dreaming about war or a fight could mean that you need to be more assertive in a real-life confrontation. Also, monsters and other nightmare creatures represent some aspect of your life that has gotten out of control. The most common type of nightmare is that of being chased. Adults commonly find themselves being chased by a stranger usually male ; children are more often chased by some type of animal, monster or other nightmare creature.

Dream interpreters say that being chased in a nightmare represents feeling that you are being pressured or inhibited in some way.

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Some bad dreams can actually represent good changes in your life. For example, death in nightmares and dreams symbolizes a new beginning. If you dream that you are dying, perhaps you are going through an important personal change in your real life. People who were undergoing detoxification following alcohol dependence experienced poorer quality sleep and more negatively toned dreams compared with healthy controls.

After 4 weeks of abstinence, both sleep quality and dream experience improved slightly. During this time, the participants with alcohol dependency dreamed significantly more often about alcohol than the group that had not experienced dependency.

Studies have found that subjective sleep and dream quality is strongly impaired in patients with alcohol dependency. Sleep disturbances and unpleasant dreams have been linked to cocaine withdrawal, and difficulty sleeping and strange dreams have been reported after discontinuing tetrahydrocannabinol THC , or marijuana, use. People with affective and non-affective psychoses have been found to have higher levels of unusual thinking, or cognitive bizarreness, both when dreaming and awake.

Narcolepsy with cataplexy NC is a neurological disorder that features excessive daytime sleepiness and changes in sleep patterns. Studies have found that most people have about percent dream recall, whether or not they have NC. These findings suggest that for people with NC, the cognitive processes underlying dream generation operate more effectively earlier in the night, compared with other people.

Sleep disturbances and bad dreams have been linked to Parkinson's disease.

Results suggested that those with RBD were more likely to experience violent dreams, but that neither RBD nor violent dreams was linked to testosterone levels in men with PD. Another study involved both men and women with PD. It linked RBD with violent dreams in both sexes. The dream content was similar for male and female participants, but men tended to experience more violent dreams.

How to Avoid Nightmares and Get More Restful Sleep

Disturbed sleep patterns, nightmares, and anxiety-filled dreams are symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder PTSD. It is often said that 5 minutes after the end of a dream, we have forgotten 50 percent of its content, and 10 minutes later, we have forgotten 90 percent. Dream researchers estimate that around 95 percent of all dreams are forgotten entirely upon awakening.

Some people have no difficulty remembering several dreams nightly, while others rarely or never recall dreams. Some aspect of sleep appears to make it difficult for dreamers to remember what happened. Most dreams are forgotten, but sometimes a dream is suddenly remembered later in the day or on another day. Writing down or recording dreams may help you remember them. This suggests that the memory is not totally lost, but for some reason it is hard to retrieve. Brain lesion and neuroimaging studies have indicated that the temporo-parieto-occipital junction and ventromesial prefrontal cortex play crucial roles in dream recall.

Surface EEG studies showed that sleep cortical oscillations associated with successful dream recall are the same as those involved in forming and recalling episodic memories while awake. Specific cortical activity has been linked with successful dream recall after waking up from REM sleep, a finding which strengthens the theory that dream recall and episodic memory during wakefulness are linked.

A different area of the brain has been linked with successful dream recall after awakening from stage 2 NREM sleep. Overall, these findings suggest that mechanisms underlying the encoding and recall of episodic memories may remain the same across different states of consciousness, in other words, whether awake or asleep. Another study using MRI techniques found that vivid, bizarre, and emotionally intense dreams — the dreams people usually remember — are linked to parts of brain areas known as the amygdala and hippocampus.

The amygdala plays a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions. The hippocampus has been implicated in important memory functions, such as consolidating information from short-term to long-term memory. People who have a clinical condition known as Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome lose the ability to dream.

How to Avoid Nightmares & Bad Dreams to Get More Restful Sleep

A loss of the ability to dream was also noted in one person who experienced a lesion in a part of the brain known as the right inferior lingual gyrus. This is located in the visual cortex. It may be that this area of the brain, which is associated with visual processing, emotion and visual memories, plays a role in either generating or transmitting dreams. People have speculated about dreams for thousands of years, but only recently have advances in technology make it possible to study brain activity in ways that may help us understand what really happens when we dream.

However, much about the life of dreams remains a mystery. Article last updated by Yvette Brazier on Tue 15 May All references are available in the References tab. Annals of Neurology, 56 4 , The incidence of unpleasant dreams after sub-anesthetic ketamine [Abstract]. Psychopharmacology, 1 , Movement Disorders, 22 2 , Stability of cognition across wakefulness and dreams in psychotic major depression [Abstract].

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Nightmares

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Register for a free account Sign up for a free Medical News Today account to customize your medical and health news experiences. Register take the tour. Reviewed by Timothy J. Table of contents How do we dream? Bad dreams and nightmares Night terrors Recurring dreams Lucid dreams Wet dreams Impact of drugs and conditions Remembering dreams.