Nightmares dream to help us

“I am in some strange building that looks like an abandoned hospital, or maybe it’s a factory or a prison. Everything is immersed in darkness, but I feel someone’s presence. Suddenly a monster appears, half-man, half-snake. I want to run away from him, but the body refuses to obey. The terrible creature whistles closer. At this moment, I wake up, covered in sweat … “

Here is an example of a typical nightmare, variations of which, with certain details, each of us had to see in a dream. Three-quarters of the dreams that patients bring to ethnopsychoanalyst Toby Nathan are nightmares.

This is not surprising: the more we are disturbed by the content of a dream, the more we want to understand what it means. Night terrors are a transfigured and exaggerated (with thickening of colors) reflection of what we experience, the questions we ask ourselves, our conflicts, professional, family or marital.

That is why, experiencing the stress associated with a divorce or dismissal, we find ourselves more prone to such dreams. They are by no means a sign of some kind of pathological ailment, except in cases where we have very scary dreams every night, as a result of which we stop sleeping at all – here you should contact a specialist.

These depressing dreams, the appearance of which the ancestors attributed to demons, remained unexplored for a long time. Even now, many of their secrets remain unsolved. The ancient interpreters of dreams were wary of revealing their essence, preferring to invite those who saw them to perform a series of rituals to get rid of them.

Sigmund Freud saw in such dreams an attempt by the unconscious to realize repressed sexual desires, taking advantage of the fact that consciousness is partially switched off in a dream. His hypothesis has not yet received any scientific confirmation or refutation. And the psychoanalysts themselves were very puzzled by the far from obvious goal of looking for traces of such desires in bad dreams.

According to most psychologists, such dreams help to cope with emotions and regulate internal conflicts. Perhaps this ability to put all your senses into a state of alarm is inherited from the prehistoric era, when, having no weapons against predators, people were forced to be constantly on the alert in order to survive.

Is the dream a hidden message?

However, the very mechanism of the functioning of nightmares remains a mystery. Indeed, it is very difficult to study them scientifically in the laboratory: the subjects are comforted by the presence of a number of researchers watching them, and, as a rule, they sleep peacefully.

Despite all the existing difficulties, according to modern research in the field of sleep, neuroscientists distinguish two types of nightmares.

• Some occur during REM sleep, leaving feelings of bitterness, frustration, anger, or guilt upon awakening.
• Others arise during deep slow-wave sleep, they cause the greatest anxiety in us to the point that, unable to escape from the embrace of horror, we wake up in a sweat, trembling, with a pounding heart.

One thing can be said with certainty, and here the ancient interpreters of dreams and modern psychoanalysts will agree: dreams have a secret meaning.

According to the ethnopsychoanalyst Toby Nathan, if the nightmare is correctly interpreted, it “will allow us to perceive some truth about us, which we vaguely feel, but do not want or cannot know. He reveals something in the behavior of others.

A classic example is when an organization decides to fire an employee. His superiors have not told him anything, but in the heavy atmosphere of omissions and secrets, he senses some signs that point to his dismissal. And then he has nightmares, the purpose of which is to warn him. Once he is face to face with this situation, the nightmares will stop.”

It seems that bad dreams are more flexible and sensitive than conscious sensations, reacting to what we experience in reality, and give it an assessment.

Hit parade of fears

From the hundreds of stories that Toby Nathan listened to from his patients, we have identified three recurring big nightmare themes.

1. Paralysis. The plane falls on the head, and the feet seem to be glued to the ground. We want to call for help, but we can’t make a sound. We are in danger or we anticipate it, we try to act, but we cannot do anything. These scenarios may indicate some situation of aggression that we more or less passively experience in our lives: we are in danger, we must be vigilant.

Scientifically speaking, this disturbing inability to defend ourselves reflects a physiological reality: when we sleep, motor functions are blocked, and the body is indeed constrained. And it’s good that it is, otherwise we would all turn into somnambulists.

For the same reason, blocking the motor function in nightmares, we do not react in any way to the danger that threatens us. Or, in erotic dreams, we almost always take a passive position, obeying the will of another. In our dreams, physiological reality and imagination are confused.

2. Fall into the void. In the house where we are, the ceiling collapses, the floor collapses, and we find ourselves in total emptiness. Such bad dreams are associated with experiences of abandonment, real or imagined. They express the fear of losing control, of letting go of the reins, of relaxing.

And yet, according to Toby Nathan, such dreams warn that someone has betrayed us or is about to do so. Beware of deception: if we do not pay attention to this, we risk falling from a height …

It’s not about some kind of telepathy or special insight, it’s just an intuitive feeling that arises from a strange feeling of inconvenience, awkwardness, a vague feeling of incompatibility with this or that person, at first glance too nice to really be sincere, too polite to be honest.

3. Encounters with masked, grimacing or strangely dressed people. Meanwhile, these characters only warn us that some kind of unspokenness is in the air. For example, a person who pretends to be a friend is actually deceiving us.

Or maybe a romantic option: a person from our environment is in love with us, but does not dare to admit it. Here, too, there is no clairvoyance, only our sensitivity, which is sharpened by the state of sleep.

What do men dream about and what about women?

Confirming our observations, Canadian psychologist Antonio Zadra, who has been collecting dreams for more than a decade and analyzed more than ten thousand stories, also testifies that in a huge number of cases violence arises in nightmares.

However, men and women fight different aggressors at night. The former fight for their survival in military conflicts, in floods, during earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. For the most part, women get experiences from quarrels, scenes of parting or humiliation, participation in various psychological dramas, where they act as the heroines of the film.

As if daytime stamps show up in our dreams. It seems that both sexes fight nightmares with the same weapons they use when they are awake: men use action, women use words and emotions.

Antonio Zadra’s work has also shown that we deal with the emotional weight of bad dreams in different ways: some wake up exactly an instant before the aggressor pounces on them, others hold out longer and have time to watch how badly injured they are. But here we do not find differences between the sexes.

The theory of happy dreams

While nightmares are often useful warning signs, the most traumatic of them may indicate a need for treatment. This refers to nightmares that arise as a result of an accident, a car accident, aggression, a psychological shock that we cannot cope with.

“During World War II, in order to heal soldiers with psychological trauma, American military psychologists developed a special technique that multiplies the number of nightmares,” says Toby Nathan. – And then, after a certain time, there was a final, permissive dream, “with a happy ending.” A bomber pilot who had to jump out of a car engulfed in flames ended up having a dream in which his plane landed softly, he himself happily avoided danger and met with other crew members for a glass of strong drink.

Today, such “happy ending” dreams can be achieved with much more gentle techniques, such as those based on visualization. One of them – imagery rehearsal therapy, or IRT – was developed in the USA, and now it is used in Europe.

The patient, together with the psychotherapist, mentally rewrites the script of the obsessive nightmare. Attracting the most pleasant images and details, the patient composes a more prosperous ending of the story, which takes root in his psyche. At the same time, the nightmare that traumatized him dissipates. Healing usually occurs within five to eight weeks.