Understanding Nightmares and Learning to Control Them

For most people, just mentioning the word nightmare brings back memories from their childhood, waking up in terror after just being chased by a terrifying monster or animal, battling criminals, being trapped in a dark and dismal place, being sucked up by a tornado or swallowed up by a river, the list of possibilities is endless. For many people, this is a rare nuisance that disturbs their sleep only every once in a while. For some people, like me, this is still an almost nightly occurrence. Is it a curse? Well I used to feel that way, and admittedly sometimes still do after a particularly bad few nights. But for me, these nightmares have led me down a path of exploration that has taught me how to understand these dreams and also how to control them.

So after 34 years of nightmares and almost as much time reading about the anatomy of nightmares, I thought I would share what I’ve learned and hope that it can benefit others who are dealing with frequent nightmares in their life or just provide some interesting reading for those who are just curious. I won’t be getting into how to control your nightmares in this article because that is huge topic that takes special techniques and lots of practice, but if you’re interested in learning how to do that, Lucid Dreaming is the topic you want to look into. What I will cover in this article is:

• Defining a Nightmare
• Night Terrors
• Post-Traumatic Stress Nightmares (PSNs)
• Getting Back to Sleep After a Nightmare
• Common Nightmares
• Recurring Nightmares
• Confronting your Nightmares

Usually when we think of nightmares, we think of dreams that are painful, scary, or unpleasant in some other way. However, this is only one type of occurrence. Researchers have also recorded complaints from their subjects that there is a second type of nightmare. In these “nightmares” the subjects reported waking up to an extreme sense of fear or foreboding but were unable to remember exactly what had frightened them. However, only the first of these is technically a nightmare. These nightmares are often much more vivid and realistic than other dreams, making them harder to recognize as a dream while you’re in them until you wake up, usually at the most frightening part.

Like most dreams, nightmares usually happen during REM sleep. These dreams will usually cause the dreamer to wake up within 15 minutes of entering REM sleep, but to the dreamer, the sense of time associated to the nightmare may be off making the nightmare seem hours long. Nightmares are often characterized by the following:

• When the dreamer awakens they may experience a sense of fear or even dream that could stay with them for hours and sometimes days.
• Dreamers do not experience the flailing and other physical arousal, if you are seeing this please skip down to the section on Night Terrors. While you may see a slightly higher pulse rate and increased eye movement during a nightmare, it will not be extreme.
• When the dreamer wakes up, they will be able to recall all or part of the storyline of the dream. Nightmares most often involve the dreamer being harmed or otherwise threatened in some way.

You may be able to see a pattern in you nightmare themes over the course of months or years. These themes are an important part in figuring out the cause of your nightmares as they usually correlate to something happening in your life. Although, this isn’t always the case, some people are just prone to scary dreams.

Nightmares are the easiest of our dreams to remember, while other dream images my float out of your mind within minutes of waking up, nightmares may stay with you for hours, days, or years. I can still remember a nightmare that I had only once when I was three years old as clearly as if I dreamt it last night. This probably occurs because the nightmare is seen by the mind as a traumatic event, and trauma always etches a deeper groove in our memory than happiness.

While the cause of nightmares isn’t always know, there are things that we know will increase their occurrence. So if you have a problem with frequent nightmares, keep these in mind and make an effort to modify your lifestyle to avoid nightmare inducing influences such as:

• Drugs
• Alcohol
• Stress
• Lack of Sleep
• Irregular Sleep Pattern
• Eating Just Before Bed

What if you’ve done all of that already and you still suffer from frequent nightmares? Believe me, I can relate! Researchers have found that some people are just more prone to nightmares than others. In fact, there are even specific personality types associated with chronic nightmare sufferers. These people often have “thin boundaries” according to Dr. Ernest Hartmann, director of a sleep laboratory in Boston, MA. In other words, people who experience frequent nightmares are highly creative, sensitive and emotional, these people are also more prone to depression than others due to their over sensitivity and empathy. They have a hard time protecting themselves from both external and internal stressors and tend to roll problems around in their minds over and over again. Interestingly, when studied by psychiatrists, people who suffer from a higher than average occurrence of nightmares, also tend to see more indistinct, diffuse, or torn patterns in the Rorschach ink blot tests.

Night Terrors, also known as sleep terrors, are commonly confused with nightmares. However, night terrors are not even classified as dreams. Night terrors happen during non-REM or dream sleep and they usually occur within two hours of falling asleep. While nightmares are a normal occurrence for most people, night terrors are usually considered a sleeping disorder, or more correctly a “disorder of arousal.” You can recognize a night terror by any or all of the following symptoms occurring in the subject:

• Abruptly awakening. These “awakenings” are only partial and often result in the waking world mixing with the dream world. The person experiencing the night terror may confuse images in the room as part of their dream and the people around them may take on the form of the monsters or bad guys in their dream.
• They have increased blood pressure, heart rate, and respiratory rate that does not occur during true dreaming due to the natural paralysis that is experienced by the body during a true dream state.
• They will show the classic physical responses to fear such as confusion, panic, sweating, and dilated pupils.
• During their brief awakenings they may abruptly sit straight up in bed and even scream or, slightly less dramatic, experience flailing arms and legs while they appear to be asleep.
• If the subject wakes up completely during the night terror, they won’t usually recall very specific images, just a feeling, such as being chased or suffocating. If they don’t wake up fully, there will be no recollection of the night terror at all.

It is unclear what causes night terrors, but it is generally accepted that these are not a symptom of an underlying psychological issue in most cases and can not be interpreted to find the subconscious meaning as other dreams can. Most scientists believe that night terrors have their basis in biological functions that conflict with each other due to the confusing state of partial awareness and partial sleep.

Night terrors are most common in children from the ages of three to eight. Although they can continue on throughout life. My mom still has them, and she is well into her 50’s. If you are the parent or spouse of someone experiencing night terrors, they can be extremely difficult to watch and your natural instinct is to wake the person up, hoping to end their suffering. The truth is, that attempting to wake up someone experiencing a night terror makes it worse. Usually this results in extending the duration of the dream as you keep them in a state of semi-alertness when the body would likely put itself back to sleep. You may also make the dream worse since you could be seen by the dreaming person as a new monster in their dream that is trying to get them. The fact is, that if you just let the individual go through the night terror and fall back to sleep naturally, they will rarely remember any of it.

Dream experts put post-traumatic stress nightmare into their own category apart from the typical anxiety REM nightmare because they are a bit different. These dreams are usually experienced by people who had gone through a traumatic event and the content of their nightmare will closely resemble the event itself. These dreams are usually very literal with very little symbolic imagery included. However, over time, PSMs can begin to change slightly and began to absorb images from the subjects current life.

There are documented cases of concentration camp and prisoners of war experience PSN for up to 50 years after the event. These dream occur in REM sleep, just like typical nightmares, however, the physical symptoms associated with these dreams is often much more pronounced than you would see with the typical anxiety nightmare. Oftentimes, sufferers of PSNs will experience multiple awakenings during their dream, falling immediately back into a dream state after each time they wake up and they can also experience some twitching or other minor body movements during these dreams, making them look almost like a less severe night terror as far as physical symptoms go.

There are many theories as to the purpose of post-traumatic stress dreams. Some psychologists believe that the mind is attempting to replay the event over and over again trying to find some safe way out that would have led to a happier conclusion of the event. While others believe that the stress induced by the traumatic experience is just too much for your subconscious to deal with at once, so instead the mind stores it away and evaluates over and over again in a dream state where you mind can think and process ideas more clearly. Eventually, most dreamers will began to experience less anxiety associated with their traumatic event and as they do, the PSNs will also diminish.

While anxiety nightmares are just as scary while you are in them, most of us have the fortune to waking up and being able to feel the relief of knowing it was just a dream. But does that make it any easier to sleep at night? Probably not, the feeling of dread and fear can often keep even the ordinary dreamer awake for the rest of the night.

No matter what happens in your nightmare world, there are two important things to remember. The first one is that you can not die from a dream. No matter what happens, nothing in your dream can harm you, and, unlike what some myths might tell you, if you die in your dream, you don’t die in real life. One of the best things about the dream world is that it is a safe place to explore and experiment with your fantasies and also to work through your problems including scary ideas or situations that may cause nightmares.

The second is that you are the creator of your own dreams. Everything that happens in your nightmare came from inside your own head. They are not showing you foreboding warnings about future events to come and don’t mean something bad will happen to you or someone you love. In fact, nightmares are often messages from your subconscious mind to your conscious mind, and they may be trying to help you realize something about yourself or your life that you may have been overlooking. Often, this meaning is hard to recognize and is imbedded in many images and symbols that can be interpreted to find the meaning, dream interpretation is a process that can be helpful in interpreting the true meaning of your nightmares.

Some common causes of these nightmares may be negative feelings that we are repressing in our waking life that need to be expressed, thus finding an outlet in your dreams. Or you may be angry about a situation such as your spouse leaving you or getting fired from your job. In your dream world, these feelings get distorted and jumbled up, this is how you end up with a nightmare. When you discover the cause of those nightmares, and deal with the cause internally, the nightmares will usually cease.

Although knowing all of that is good, it’s probably ot going to help you get back to sleep after the nightmare occurs. You may not be able to sleep due to the increased adrenaline flowing through your system or from a fear that the nightmare will reoccur. Even though returning to your nightmare is more likely to help you understand the cause than avoiding it, that is little consolation for most of us when all we want is some peaceful rest.

However, like it or not, nightmares are showing you worries and fears that are happening inside of you right now and they won’t go away if you don’t deal with them. So when you wake up, take a few minutes to consider your dream, remind yourself that the dream wasn’t real and that you were not in danger, then write the dream down with the intention of trying to understand it better in the morning. Just knowing that you plan to deal with the feelings causing your nightmare is usually enough to keep your sub-conscious from subjecting you too that dream again.

Now you have to decide whether or not you want to return to your nightmare and try to work through those images in more detail or if you just want to go back to sleep and get some nightmare-free rest time. If you do what to return to your nightmare, it’s fairly easy to do. Think of a specific image or scene from the dream and hold it in your mind as you lay there. This about the dream and the questions you still want answers to, Who is under your pursuer’s mask? If I get sucked up by that tornado, can I fly out when I reach the top under my own control and explore the world? Keep thinking about your questions for as long as possible as you drift off to sleep. This will greatly improve your chances of returning to the same dream, and if you kept your questions positive, will drastically improve the mood of the dream.

If you just want to go back to sleep and not return to your nightmare, then focus your thoughts on something that makes you feel safe as you lie there. Picture it in your head and imagine the sounds and smells that accompany that thought. You may find it helpful to play relaxing music or soothing sounds from a white noise machine. There is no way to guarantee that you will return to peaceful sleep, but this is the most effective way and most likely to produce the results you want. It is also a good stepping stone to the practice of lucid dreaming.

Some of the most common types of nightmares are ones that involved being hunted down or chased. Many researchers believe that this may be a result of inherited memories from our collective human experience dating back to the time when our ancestors were often chased and eaten by wild animals as prey. Since being caught, meant certain death, the subconscious may use the dream world to help “practice” escaping from these foes. It has been proven that dreaming about something such as a video game or obstacle course improves the dreamers performance, so it’s not hard to assume that dreams of escaping a chasing predator were used by the mind to help you prepare and sharpen you wits, should you need to escape from that situation in your waking life.

There are an almost infinite number of possibilities when it comes to nightmare images. All of them can leave you feeling scared and out of control. Often, the feelings from these nightmares bleed over into our waking life. Giving us a slight sense of anxiety the next day of a lose of self-confidence. But, more often than not, these dreams were caused by that lowering of self-confidence in the first place.

No matter what the theme of your nightmare, when you wake up to a racing mind and pounding heart, it’s often hard to remember that none of it is real and that you were the author of that terrifying imagery. The good news is, that you can use these nightmares to help you in your waking life, and that by determining what the dream means and dealing with that will make your nightmare less scary.

When you have a nightmare, your subconscious is trying to tell you something, something that is so powerful that it forces you to wake up. By examining the message (your nightmare) closely, you will often find links to events and occurrences in your daily life that you are dreading or that have already happened and you’re not ready to face internally.

Recurring nightmares are fairly common since the dreams are usually trying to communicate something we are unwilling or unable to deal with in our waking life. If you have the same nightmare over and over again, this means that you have not yet dealt with some negative feelings you are experiencing in your waking life. Dream interpretation is a great way to help you get to the bottom of your nightmare, however it is a very big topic so we’ll just cover the most common nightmare, being chased, for now.

When you dream of being chased, it is important to take a close look at your pursuer. If you are being chased by another person, does this person remind you of anyone in your real life? The person chasing you doesn’t have to look exactly like the person the image is representing in your life, but your instincts and feeling should tell you the true identity of your aggressor. Don’t second guess how you feel here, no one can tell you what your mind thinks better than yourself! After you’ve identified the person, study that relationship closely. Usually people who dream of being chased by someone in their life feel out of control of the relationship, maybe even repressed by the other person and this dream is an attempt to “get away” from them emotionally and break out from that oppression to come into your own. That doesn’t necessarily mean you want the relationship to end, but it could mean you need to try to be more lacerative and feel more like the relationship shares the balance of power.

If you are being chased by an animal or other non-human attacker, your pursuer probably represents a part of yourself. Pay attention to how the creature chasing you feels to you. An animal that represents aggression to you may indicated that you have an internal beast that is trying to break out or anger that you are trying to hold back in an ongoing situation in your life. An animal or masked figure who has a feeling of sexual magnetism may be referring to hidden desires and fantasies that you are trying to repress.

What if you decide not to shake yourself from your disturbing dreams and turn around to face your fears or attackers? Embracing these dreams is almost always the best way to put an end to them. Keep in mind that these images are a message that are trying to break through into your conscious mind and that your attacker may be simply a carrier of that message. When you turn to face him, beating him up or killing him is probably not the best way to come to terms with the underlying cause of the dream and just reaffirms the continued repression of something that needs to be dealt with. Instead, when you face that fear or attacker you should find out what it’s trying to tell you. Give your fear a voice and ask it questions like, Why are you chasing me? Or What do you want?

Dreams of Violence: Are you the aggressor in your dream? If you dream about hurting someone or even just telling someone off, you may be trying to release some repressed anger towards a person or some other part of yourself. It’s much easier to tell a dream image how you truly feel than to confront the living object of your anger face to face. It may be that dreaming of this encounter is enough to help your mind deal with those feeling and move on. However, if this situation you’re your life is ongoing and the feelings and/or nightmares do not go away, you may have to find a way to tell this person how you feel in order to find relief.

On the other hand, if you are the victim of someone else’s violence, it could mean that you feel guilty about some achievement in your life. Perhaps you feel like you have crossed someone or not given them due credit to your success. If this is the case, do something to show them they are appreciated. Thanks them for their help or tell others how they contributed.

Drowning: Dreams of drowning often indicate that you are feeling overwhelmed in your waking life or that you are being “flooded” by emotions. If you are having this dream on a recurring basis, finding relief may be as simple as slowing down a little and removing some of the sources of stress. If you’ve taken on too much, ask for help. If your emotions are overwhelming you, find someone to talk to about them.

Paralyzed by Fear: The inability to move or communicate in a dream is another fairly common occurrence. Some researchers believe this is just a natural representation of the fact that you are paralyzed by your body’s natural chemicals during REM sleep. However, it could mean that you feel like there is a situation in your life that you are unable to fix. You may be torn between possible solutions to a problem or fighting the sense that it is time to settle down and start a career or family. Making the choice to move you to the next stage of this problem will end this nightmare.

Each type of dream represents a different type of problem in your life, by examining the dream and how it makes you feel more closely, you can find out what the problem is that’s troubling your subconscious and, in turn, find a way to deal with it. Once you’ve done that, the path to peaceful nights and happy dreams is at hand.