Sometimes the dreams we have seem so real. Most of the emotions, sensations, and images we feel and visualize are those that we can say we have seen or experienced in real life. This is because the same parts of the brain that are active when we are awake are also active when we are in certain stages of our sleep.
Nightmare disorder is referred to by doctors as a parasomnia — a type of sleep disorder that involves undesirable experiences that occur while you're falling asleep, during sleep or when you're waking up. Nightmares usually occur during the stage of sleep known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.
Lucid dreams are when you know that you're dreaming while you're asleep. You're aware that the events flashing through your brain aren't really happening. But the dream feels vivid and real. You may even be able to control how the action unfolds, as if you're directing a movie in your sleep.
While the functionality and meaning of nightmares vary, they typically function to make us aware of a problem that is or could affect us mentally, emotionally, or physically.
What do frequent nightmares actually mean? If you have a certain nightmare over and over again, your subconscious may be trying to tell you something important. "Nightmares are the brain working through emotions," says Wallace.
Nightmares can arise for a number of reasons—stress, anxiety, irregular sleep, medications, mental health disorders—but perhaps the most studied cause is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Because nightmares may have a significant impact on your quality of life, it's important to consult a medical professional if you experience them regularly. Sleep deprivation, which can be caused by nightmares, can cause a host of medical conditions, including heart disease, depression, and obesity.
Nightmares could help relieve stress, prepare for real-life threats, and provide insight into suppressed emotions, say experts. “Interpreting our dreams [and nightmares] often makes us understand something about what we're thinking or feeling that we haven't been conscious of,” Deirdre Barrett, Ph.
Sleep terrors differ from nightmares. The dreamer of a nightmare wakes up from the dream and may remember details, but a person who has a sleep terror episode remains asleep. Children usually don't remember anything about their sleep terrors in the morning.
Waking up Crying From a Dream
The sensations you feel while sleeping and the emotions you experience before bed may cause you to wake up crying. If you wake up crying from a bad dream, that is your body's response to the weight of the suppressed emotion.
Although some theorists have suggested that pain sensations cannot be part of the dreaming world, research has shown that pain sensations occur in about 1% of the dreams in healthy persons and in about 30% of patients with acute, severe pain.
Epic dreaming refers to complaints of excessive dreaming combined with daytime fatigue. 29,30. Patients complain of dreaming all night long about continuous physical activity, often of a banal nature, such as repetitive housework or endless walking through snow or mud.
It's called paradoxical insomnia, and the latest research suggests that those suffering from the condition are not really awake but trapped in a bad dream limbo that simulates being awake. And that can get exhausting.
Stress, anxiety or depression
A particularly stressful day can lead to intrusive thoughts in the middle of the night — maybe they come in the form of a nightmare that jolts you up at 3 a.m. In more serious cases, some people even experience sleep paralysis. Anxiety can also make it difficult to sleep through the night.
Upon waking up from a nightmare, it's normal to be acutely aware of what happened in the dream, and many people find themselves feeling upset or anxious. Physical symptoms like heart rate changes or sweating may be detected after waking up as well.
If you can realize you're in a nightmare, the simplest way to stop it is to make yourself wake up, Arthuro said. But some evidence suggests that it's possible to stay in the nightmare but eliminate your fear by knowing you aren't in physical danger, according to Arthuro.
How Long Do Nightmares Last? The average dream length of a nightmare can be 10-20 minutes while bouts of night terrors can be up to 45 minutes in length.
Can nightmares cause trauma? Waking up from a nightmare can be scary and distressing. However, it's not known for sure whether nightmares can cause trauma. Some research³ suggests that nightmares may speed up the development of PTSD and strengthen the symptoms associated with trauma.
Independent of mental disorders, nightmares are often associated with sleep problems such as prolonged sleep latencies, poorer sleep quality, and daytime sleepiness.
Indeed, studies suggest that nightmares are often linked to unmet psychological needs and/or frustration with life experiences. Yet those links aren't always easy to make—except in cases of trauma (discussed below), our nightmares tend to reflect our troubles through metaphor rather than literal representation.
The impact that melatonin has on dreaming is further shown in the fact that higher doses of this hormone can lead to more lucid dreams and even nightmares.
Most experts believe that lucid dreams are the rarest type of dreams. While dreaming, you are conscious that you are dreaming but you keep on dreaming. According to researchers, 55 percent of people experience these types of dreams at least one time in their life.