![]() Stress, anxiety, and sleep issues can all play their part as well as, perhaps most pertinently, post-traumatic stress disorder. Our mental health impacts the prevalence of nightmares, too. As is withdrawing from drugs that cause REM sleep rebound, such as ethanol, barbiturates, and benzodiazepines. Use of medications that affect neurotransmitter levels of the central nervous system, such as antidepressants, narcotics, or barbiturates are also associated with nightmares. Instead of seeing issues as being black and white, they instead see themselves and the world in shades of gray. Persons with thin boundaries are less likely to define the world around them in concrete terms. Nightmares are often reported in creative people who demonstrate “thin boundaries” on psychological tests. And a published study of 1,049 insomnia sufferers in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, found that 18.3% of those with that sleep disorder experienced nightmares. Whatever the meaning or non-meaning, we are more likely to experience fear than any other emotion when dreaming - a Harvard Medical School study found it accounts for 32% of all emotions experienced in our dreams.Īround 5% to 8% of the adult population are estimated to have a problem with frequent nightmares. A more recent theory argues that the dreaming brain acts as a “virtual reality generator” to help us to learn about and make sense of the real world. Others propose that dreams are just our attempt to interpret random signals generated by emotions and patterns in the brain. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist who founded the field of analytical psychology, believed that dreams were the psyche’s way of communicating messages to the dreamer from the unconscious. But the purpose of dreaming, and therefore nightmares, remains one of the most hotly debated topics in psychology.Īcclaimed neurologist Sigmund Freud thought that dreams were a way for us to fulfill unconscious desires repressed from conscious awareness. ![]() While the essence of that definition still rings true to an extent, research into dreams has moved on significantly in the last 300 years. In the Universal Etymological English Dictionary, first published in 1721, a nightmare was defined as a “disease when a man in his sleep supposes he has a great weight laying upon him.”
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