Why Do People Experience Nightmares?

Posted: August 25th, 2021

Why Do People Experience Nightmares?

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Abstract

People respond to sleeping differently. As others enjoy its calming effect, some find it horrible to go to bed due to the recurrent memories of bad dreams. Traditionally, people regarded nightmares as some kind of evil spirits that looked for souls to torment, mostly at night when everyone else was deep asleep. This paper investigates the scientific basis why people experience nightmares more frequently than others. It begins by creating a connection between the ancient perspective of dream before science dominated the world, and presents scholars thoughts about dreams in general in the modern times. This study argues that the main reason why people experience nightmares is because of their body trying to communicate about some of the psychologically important issues they have failed to address, which results in fear, personal conflicts, and frustration.

Why Do People Experience Nightmares?

Introduction

Nightmares are widespread occurrences of disturbing dreams that people experience at some point in their lives. While some persons encounter horrors not frequently, a majority of individuals complain of facing nightmares throughout their life cycle. In the ancient times, people considered persistence and vividness of nightmares as aspects of evil spirits that were looking for souls to haunt and ultimately suffocate while victims were asleep. Although there are no scientific proofs for these claims, the aftermath of nightmares are the same to everyone, whether they lived in the past or are living today. For instance, some people feel post-sleep depression whereas others feel oppressed by the dreams and hence become helpless in the long run. This paper involves a critical analysis of past studies on nightmare, its causes, effects, and management in case it occurs repeatedly. It assembles different scholars’ perspective on some of the compelling fears associated with the nightmares. The outcome of this evaluation will be ideal for people who are traumatized by their dreams to the extent of feeling low and depressed. So, why exactly do people experience nightmares? Could it be a result of some spiritual presence taking control of our lives or is it due to our mentalityin the ordinary life? A nightmare serves to draw our attention to some of the psychologically important events that we have neglected continuously, which results in fear, frustrations, and internal conflict.

Background

A nightmare is a dream linked with negative feelings that originates mostly from anxiety and fear. While kids experience more instances of fantasies, nearly half of the adult population are still in the battle with some dreaded dreams of their lives (Fishman, 2016). The affected individuals often feel rattled by the toorealistic and frightening thoughts, and in more severe cases, these feelings could result in sleep deprivation. According to Mayo Clinic reports, most children have a decrease in nightmares as they grow progressively into early teenageyears (Fishman, 2016). As young adults, girls tend to be more affected by the traumatizing effects of horrors than the boys do. Whereas cases of nightmares are common, the nightmare disorder is less frequent though highly life-threatening.

Recurrent nightmares, also known as nightmare disorder, are mainly a stiff challenge affecting people in their waking life. Other than frequent occurrences, this category of dreams is a major cause of impairment and distress during the day including bedtime anxiety that could attract another supposed nightmare (Neubauer, 2009). Besides, people who experience this disorder have issues with their memory and usually complain of concentration problems. The victims mostly wake up feeling afraid and distressed. In a mythological perspective, the demon often guards sacred places. Logically, the emergence of monsters during sleep represents the presence of emotional gaps in a person’s life which people are either assuming or are afraid to confront. Therefore, if such an individual manages to defend the monster in their life, then the incident will cease from horrific dream to healthy sleep. 

Research Methods and Study Approach

For ages now, studies on nightmares have existed as mere abstracts with no definitive cause and effect relationship. However, this paper will apply different analytical designs to establish a concrete conclusion on why people experience nightmares. Firstly, questions and answers will be an instrumental tool to explore theories presented in other texts. Secondly, through comparison and contrast approach, the research will analytically determine the extent of truth available in the concept of a nightmare described by other scholars. Thus, for ideal understanding, there is aneed to explore some of the important pointers to explain the change of perspective from the traditional view about nightmares to the contemporary belief about the scary dreams.

As qualitative research, this paper will rely exclusively on available literature to carefully define words and develop concepts about nightmares. Most importantly, it will explore the interrelationships surrounding the key arguments, their counteraction, and the final opinion on the variables. Therefore, the main tools that will be necessary for this analysis include observation notes, literary texts, interview transcripts, and historical records for clarity of the issue of why some people encounter repeated nightmares while others do not.

Findings and their Analysis

All human beings dream; however, not everyone can recall what the dream was about. While other people dream normally, for some individuals sleeping becomes a terrifying experience which is difficult to forget. What makes some dreams more dreadful than others? According to Williams Kelly (2018), nightmares trigger unpleasant emotions with feelings of imminent insecurity among victims. His argument triggers yet another question – what makes people feel threatened about their safety when they are asleep? Essentially, nightmares are a clear reflection of the last internal conflict and compromised ego that express themselves whenever a person relaxes (Kelly, 2018). An investigation into various types of parasomnias reveals how people express distinct behaviors and experiences every time they fall asleep. Non-rapid eye movement, nocturnal panic attack, rapid eye movement disorder, and nocturnal seizures are some of the obvious examples of how people respond to dreams(Neubauer, 2009). Of all these kinds of behavioral aspects, nightmares present the most functional characteristic.No wonder people experiencing nightmares are becoming an attraction to the sleep specialists and scholars as well. For instance, in the case of a nightmare, the victim can successfully describe the awakening instances arising from the vivid and frightening dreams (Neubauer, 2009). Dealing with these disturbing events requires that the affected people evaluate some of the psychologically important things they have ignored in the past and make proper adjustments.

Stress and anxiety are some of the leading reasons why people fall victims of nightmares. Dreams come as messages of unconscious conflicts and wishful thoughts (Dolias, 2010). In other words, by analyzing a person’s dream behavior, one is capable of exploring and understanding the dark side psychology of the suffering individual. Depending on the nature of the nightmare, people tend to wake up with a sense of panic, acute distress, and worries. While these fears could be a result of self-punishment emanating from our inability to address challenges facing us, the truth is that frustrations and inner conflicts contribute to nightmares (Dolias, 2010). In a study by Rek, Sheaves, and Freeman (2017),a more significant percentage of psychiatric patients experience nightmares and the associated symptoms. The researchers highlighted three main categories of psychologically inducing aspects of dreams. The first one is the cognitive style in which the scholars have highlighted the impact of worries among patients diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (Rek et al., 2017). By worrying, people attempt to accommodate repetitive negative thoughts about their future giving room for fears. Similarly, hallucinatory and paranoid experiences could be another potent route for a distressing daytime psychotic encounter (Rek et al., 2017). Overall, the negative dreams represent threat rehearsals and a possible continued encounter with adverse events that lead to a psychotic, dissociation, and cognitive-based reflection.

Other than fear, guilt could also contribute to the recurrent nightmares. As body recaptures the significant events of the day, it tends to do so in cycles of sleep from the light to deep ones (Fishman, 2016). At the point of rapid eye movement, signals may not be shut appropriately leading to acted dreams. Nighttime consciousness can contribute to re-emergence of some of the events that our brain would like to forget. For instance, an infection caused by diseases like HIV/AIDs could encourage regrets about the events that led the victims to their state. These thoughtsare likely to affect one’s waking life in subsequent days. According to Soffer-Dudek (2017), trying to eliminate the negative feelings about some of the things that happened in our lives could perhaps lead to a dream rebound effect of avoidance. The more extra efforts a person puts to avoid thinking about the trauma, especially if the victim acquired the disease through rape, the more the memories will appear uninvited. The concept of dissociative flashbacks and the associated experiences can facilitate instances of nightmares (Soffer-Dudek, 2017). However, while presenting Boss’ position about the dreams, Dolias (2010) argues that dreams do not mask the phenomenological occurrences in a person’s life. Instead, they are natural processes, which are part of human growth and development. Individually, such analogies could only be applied when examining kids’ thoughts and actions like laughing or imitation of crying when in a deep sleep. For adults, guilty conscience can most probably affect the balance between their active life and the unconscious one.

Lastly, behavioral patterns including alcohol consumption, sleep duration, and daytime activities can serve to stimulate or decrease chances of experiencing nightmares. Usually, dreams occur during the late night rapid eye movement sleep. Ethanol, a component found in alcohol, has the effect of elevating the light rest and the extent through which an individual stays in the late-night REM sleep (Rek et al., 2017). Technically, most post-traumatic stress disorder patients tend to divert their attention by taking excess volumes of alcohol to help them fade some memories that traumatize them. Anything that disrupts an individual’s sleep can as well interfere with the mood and subsequently affects how a person responds to routine daytime activities (Patel, 2017). Preliminary data associate shorter sleeping durations with a more intensified rapid eye movement at night. Those who spend less than 7 hours per night seeping are more likely to experience nightmares compared to those who take more sleeping with moreextended duration (Rek et al., 2017). In essence, nightmare varies from person to person depending on the psychological condition at the time of sleeping. In other words, factors like sleep duration, alcohol, and daytime duration are mere stimulants of what is already happening in an individual’s mind.

As psychological factors dominate in scholars’ arguments regarding the cause of nightmares, exposure to certain medications is the recent cause of alarm among those experiencing bad dreams. There are two forms of sleep: rapid eye movement and non-rapid eye movement (Wenk, 2017). Pharmacotherapeutic drugs, especially the prescribedmedications, tend to alter the sleep pattern that causes dreams. Physiologically, certain drugs inhibit or induce the activities of some hormones that act by modulating the cardinal stages of sleep (Wenk, 2017). Although there are different categories of drugs, most of them alter the normal physiological process whose ultimate effect includes changes in the psychological alignment towards sleep schedule (Wenk, 2017). For instance, use of certain agents can cause drowsiness and at times can result in uncontrolled dizziness (Wenk, 2017). Drugs act by increasing the rapid eye movement. Thus, they trigger dreams and nighttime terrors. However, the use of brain stimulants like marijuana has a direct influence on dreams, particularly the nightmares (Wenk, 2017). Other drugs that antagonize the action of acetylcholine can lower the vividness of the dream (Wenk, 2017). When describing the psychological perspective of horrors, it becomes vital to highlight the medicines that affect the normal physiological processes in the brain.

Although drugs have far-reaching effects on the overall body functioning, their impact on a dream, and particularly nightmares, is limited to the central nervous system. Primarily, some of the medicines like marijuana will lower cases of insomnia and nightmares in people who have post-traumatic stress disorder (Wenk, 2017). However, caffeine and other central nervous system stimulants can quickly induce the effects of unpleasant dreams in individuals using them (Wenk, 2017). The challenge comes in cases of drug addicts using combinations of marijuana and caffeine due to their cutting effects. Often, such individuals are likely to change from rapid eye movement stage to non-rapid eye movement sleep which makes them experience altered dream perception (Wenk, 2017). For instance, if such a person could previously experience vivid dreams, due to abuse of drugs, they lose such consciousness and become unconscious about what they have dreamt. Nevertheless, continued use of different medicines can result in depression and natural anxiety which culminates in nightmares.

Conclusion

Dreamsare presented differently in every individual. In particular, nightmares frequently occur in some people more than they happen in others. Psychologically, horrors evoke unpleasant emotional feelings that capture safety concerns. In most cases, victims of stress and anxiety suffer enormously from internal conflict leading to recycled memories of the past events. Guilt and regrets have a lasting impact on the way our brain codes and interprets the causal relationship with a person’s behavior which manifests whenever such an individual falls in rapid eye movement sleep. Inherently, nightmares attract our attention to some of the psychological pressures we have ignored though they continuously come back to haunt us. In any event, a person chooses to assume or to ignore some of the stressful indicators in life.This way, they are opening room for stress and ultimately nightmares. The widespread use of drugs, whether for medication or personal reasons, leaves unexplored gaps on how exactly such medicines affect the normal body function and how this aspect can lead to nightmares.

References

Dolias, L. (2010). Bad dreams are made of this: Looking at distressing dreams in light of Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit and boss’ dream theories. Existential Analysis, 21(2), 238-251.

Fishman, S. (2016, March 21). Why I’m convinced there’s more to night terrors than just bad dreams. Retrieved from http://www.thespec.com/living-story/6399608-why-i-m-convinced-there-s-more-to-night-terrors-than-just-bad-dreams/.

Kelly, W. E. (2018). The nightmare proneness scale: A proposed measure for the tendency to experience nightmares. Sleep and Hypnosis (Online), 20(2), 120-127.

Neubauer, D. N. (2009). Fearful sleeping and waking. Primary Psychiatry, 16(11).

Patel, A. (2017, April 7). Why you keep having the same nightmares over and over again. Retrieved from https://globalnews.ca/news/3361172/recurring-nightmares/.

Rek, S., Sheaves, B., & Freeman, D. (2017). Nightmares in the general population: Identifying potential causal factors. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 52(9), 1123-1133.

Soffer-Dudek, N. (2017). Arousal in nocturnal consciousness: How dream-and sleep-experiences may inform us of poor sleep quality, stress, and psychopathology. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 733.

Wenk, G. (2017, June 19). Are your medications giving you nightmares? Retrieved from http://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-brain-food/201706/are-your-medications-giving-you-nightmares.