Darkness swirls.
Hairy tarantula legs crawl over your face. A slithering snake encircles your legs. The fins circle around you, slowly getting closer and closer as you tread through the deep, murky water.
Your teeth fall out of your mouth in a shower of enamel. You are standing in front of a large crowd of people in only your underwear…
I wake up. Sweat covers your face, your heart beats loudly in the darkness of your room, and your confused senses scramble for balance. You are fine. You are safe.
It was just a nightmare.
The stuff of nightmares
Nightmares can ruin your entire night. It’s invasive—vivid, terrifying dreams doom us to purgatory late at night, half asleep, and shaken in the dark. Terror and panic are elements associated with the nightmare-affected brain, which can persist while the mind reconciles the experience of horrific dreams with a sudden return to reality.
It is not uncommon. according to Sleep educationAn estimated 50% to 85% of adults in the United States report experiencing occasional nightmares, with up to 5% of Americans experiencing regular nightmares as a result of a nightmare disorder. For the latter camp, consistent nighttime episodes are kind of Parasomniaor disturbed sleep disorder. From sleep paralysis to SleepwalkingParasomnias can have a more serious impact on sleep quality and waking life.
If you only get the occasional nightmare—maybe once every two weeks or so—it’s usually easy to pinpoint the cause. Common nightmare triggers include stress, poor sleep hygiene, anxiety, the adrenaline rush of a scary movie, and illnesses (especially fever).
But when these nightmares start to sabotage the quality of your sleep and disturb your mind during your waking hours, that’s when there’s cause for concern.
For more than 10 years, psychology student Gemma Simpson has experienced disturbing nightmares that routinely affect her sleep and daily life.
“Sleep is always worse right after a nightmare,” she said. “It’s always lively, so I tend to unintentionally spice it up over the next few days until the shock wears off a bit.”
She describes her nightmares as rarely sensitive and largely traumatic, and violence and graphic experiences are the norm. It can be an incredibly confronting topic.
She said, “I once dreamed of my father hitting me with an aluminum baseball bat at an art gallery.” “The art gallery part was very specific and strange… I also had nightmares about sexual assault and violence.”
As a psychology student, Simpson is familiar with Freud’s theory of dreams, as they represent unconscious desires and feelings that the brain needs to process.
“All of your memory consolidation happens while you sleep,” she said. “I think it’s more likely that on the days I had nightmares, I would see something that would alert me to my trauma, even if I didn’t think about it again at the time.
According to sleep psychologist Dan Ford from Oakland Better sleep clinicTrying to interpret dreams as soon as you wake up can only be helpful if it makes you feel good.
“The general explanation is that something isn’t quite right, and that’s why you get nightmares, so maybe I’ll stick to that kind of level,” he said. “Because what you see in a dream in general, right? It’s a little irrational.”
“Maybe you’re spending your time on something that’s not really that important. If it’s something recurring related to trauma you’ve gone through, it probably doesn’t require an explanation.”
What is really going on in your brain?
According to CNET’s sister site Healthlinethe human brain in general cycles through four stages of sleep Over the course of the night.
These phases are characterized by different brain and body activity, and indicate the depth of sleep a person experiences – usually measured by an electroencephalogram, or EEG.
The first stage consists of your brain and body slowly settling into sleep — your heart rate regulates, your system begins to calm down, and it usually lasts for up to five minutes. Stage two is light sleep, where you’ve settled down but haven’t completely sunk into the depth of sleep required to begin tissue growth, system repair, and cell regeneration.
The third stage is the deep sleep stage, otherwise known as slow wave sleep. In this, the body is completely relaxed, delta waves of the brain are present and there is no eye movement. Your body renews cells, strengthens the immune system, and makes your heart rate slower.
Finally, the fourth stage is what is known as rapid eye movement sleep, or REM sleep. Here you can dream, with your brain activity ramping up and your eyes moving fast. For most people, their limbs become paralyzed while they sleep.
It usually takes up to an hour and a half to fall asleep before you settle into REM sleep, so although you may feel like you’re dreaming as soon as your head hits the pillow, you probably aren’t.
“For the average person, this means that nightmares will most likely occur in the second half of the night,” Ford said.
Nightmares only occur in REM sleep, when the mind is at its most active. In people without the stage 4 component of limb paralysis, this is also when they are They sleepwalk or act out their dreams – Although this rarely happens. others face Paralysis without sleep The part that can be terrifying in its own way.
“Basically what we’re doing is processing emotions,” Ford said, “what we’re probably seeing is someone who’s potentially hyper-arousal, so their arousal levels or the sympathetic nervous system is activated or activated, and so they bleed out in their sleep and in their nightmares.”
Nightmares vs. night terrors
Although nightmares are similar in name, night terrors are not interchangeable experiences.
When I was a teenager, I did a lot of babysitting. One night, I was covering a babysitting shift with a new family. The night seemed fine, until they went to bed. After forty minutes of falling asleep, the 9-year-old ran screaming out of the bedroom without warning.
His eyes were wide open, staring at me intently as he continued to let out blood curdling screams. Although that was not the case, he was still asleep.
What parents didn’t warn me about before they left was that their children often had night terrors, which are distinctly different from nightmares and are associated with disorientation, screaming, and other noises.
“Both are parasomnias, but they occur in different stages of sleep,” Ford said. “So night terrors will generally occur in non-dream sleep, or non-REM sleep, and nightmares will occur mostly in REM sleep.”
This means that night terrors usually occur early in the sleep cycle. Children between the ages of 4 and 12 often experience night terrors, and this is usually something that kids simply throw out.
One of the main differences between nightmares and night terrors disorders is: lack of remembrance. In the case of someone awakened from a bad dream, they will generally have a mere recollection of the most prominent features of their dream—perhaps a particularly frightening character or feeling—whereas those with night terrors tend to wake up without remembering anything. their experience at all.
As a result, night terrors can be even more disturbing to those around the sleeper. For parents, hearing your baby scream in the middle of the night is the stuff horror movies are made of.
A nightmare on every street
One, two, Freddy’s coming for you.
In the world of cinema, nightmare is synonymous with danger. From Nightmare on Elm Street to Boogeyman, not only have these movies cemented their place in pop culture, they’ve often been targeted as the culprit of real-world nightmares.
Healthline suggests If you are prone to ingesting sensitive material, you may not be the best candidate for watching horror movies due to the effect it can have on your sleep and mental health. But some people absolutely love the thrill and fright of this sort – so what is it really?
From a psychological perspective, horror films and thrillers stimulate adrenaline production in a controlled environment – an environment that is in the hands of the viewer to initiate the action, but also to put an end to it.
“One of the diagnostic criteria is that the nightmare is some kind of threat to your physical safety. In this sense, the content of the nightmare is highly threatening to the person experiencing it,” Ford said.
The problem is that with the advent of better technologies and effects, movies feel more realistic and menacing than ever – even when we’re watching fantasy creatures like zombies and monsters.
If you are someone who struggles with mental health concerns such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD in particular, the experience of watching a horror movie can definitely contribute to your chances of having a nightmare.
“I tend to steer clear of horror films where people do the horror,” Simpson said. “If they’re fantasy beings then I’m usually fine, but as a general rule I don’t really watch horror because of the potential for nightmares.”
“My mind is like, ‘I know monsters and aliens (maybe) aren’t real,’ so I can justify that, but if it’s about people, it’s just very realistic.”
Elizabeth Olsen stars in Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
marvel
Given that, it’s no wonder nightmares have cemented such a foundation in horror and thriller pop culture—the fight-or-flight reaction generated by horror movies is the same as the reaction we feel when we wake up from a nightmare that threatens our physical integrity.
But for many, seeing nightmares on film, generally with a happy ending, can feel like a safer, more manageable alternative.
One of the most comforting, if frustrating, ideas for nightmares in pop culture comes from Marvel’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The film posits that when you dream, you experience a window into the life you live in an alternate universe.
In doing so, it suggests that all dreams and nightmares can be windows into the multiverse – abstract universes with different rules, experiences, and modalities. Although there is no scientific backing, the recent trend of the multiverse making it a theory provides some comfort.
So, the next time you’re having an intense nightmare, keep in mind that maybe somewhere – in some universe – there’s a version of you stuck facing a 12-foot tarantula while you’re in your underwear.
But not you.
It’s just a dream.
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