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Can a dream change our mood?
Psychology
It is common to wake up with discomfort if we have had a nightmare
It has happened to all of us at some time. You wake up after having a nightmare, or a unpleasant dream, and that uncomfortable feeling stays inside you all day. Because yes, you know that it is only a dream, but that sadness, that fear or that anguish you have experienced, and pieces of it remain in you.
“It can happen perfectly, although we can always decide to what extent it affects us if we connect with the present and reality in a rational way,” explains Aída Rubio, psychologist and coordinator of the TherapyChat team of psychologists. However, he comments that we can say that the affectation occurs more in the opposite direction. «The state of mind that we have during the day can condition the quality and content of our dream to a great extent, ”he says, and recalls that, in general, when we experience moments of anxiety or depression, for example, our sleep is one of the first affected.
About how long that feeling generated by the dream can remain, says María José Moreno, clinical psychologist at mundopsicologos.com, that everything depends on the dream we have, and the person who has it. «If the dream has been very vivid (the dreamed seems totally real) and it is very sad, it can make the person feel sad the first hours of the next day, but you will recover little by little throughout the day», It indicates.
Own stories that seem like others
To understand why something we know is not real can affect our emotions, Aída Rubio uses works of fiction as an example: «Sometimes this happens to us if we watch a movie, read a book, it impacts us. The memory remains and it can be more or less present in our day, making us relive the emotion that caused us. He says that, in these moments, the empathy mechanism is activated, among other things. ‘We have a type of neuron called’ mirror neurons’. These neurons in our brain are activated when we carry out an action, but also when we simply think about it or even when we see others perform it ”, states the psychologist. Returning to dreams, he argues that, if the stories, real or not, that we live through others can have an impact on our emotions, «imagine the impact it can have on us reliving or remembering our dreams, which also occur in the first person and with an intense and uncensored emotional experience.
On the other hand, it is important to take into account the reason for the dreams we have. María José Moreno explains that, although there are people who think that dreams have a meaning, or that they reflect what we care about, this is not scientifically proven. “It is more likely that the content of the dream is what we have been thinking about during the dayespecially in the moments before we go to bed, “he says. Therefore, although “our dreams can be a continuation of what has occupied our mind during the day,” that does not necessarily work the other way around, that is, by dreaming about something, that does not mean that this topic worries us.
Reflection of what we feel
Another scenario to contemplate is when we have a feeling inside that we do not accept, and this begins to be part of our dreams. «If there is a emotional repression it can arise through a dream, especially through repeated dreams related to a specific emotion or topic, ”says María José Moreno. Aída Rubio adds that although in dreams there are no processing rations, we can experience those emotions that we are denying ourselves. But this does not mean that we are going to be “at peace” with that emotion. «The acceptance and the full processing of what our dreams count, must be done once awake; the dream would in principle only be a distorted reflection of our experiences, “he says.
Finally, Aída Rubio leaves some recommendations in case we have an uncomfortable sleep and we wake up affected by it. The first thing is to give us a few minutes, when we are awake, «to cope with that emotion, name it and understand it». “Surely it remains entrenched because you are avoiding it or navigating in the background of your thinking without you having paid any real attention to it,” says the psychologist. On the other hand, he comments that if we see that the emotion is still there because it refers to a real problem that the dream has been able to remove, “the best thing is to find a solution or accept the discomfort if it is not in our power to solve it.” Finally, it indicates that if, simply, we speak of a strange sensation, but without connection with the reality of our life, we must manage to return to the present, with questions such as: «What is reality?», «Where am I now? » or “what was he doing?”