What dreams does mental illness create?

While in a dream, the dreamer can do whatever his heart desires: rob banks, fly, breathe underwater and jump from high-rise buildings without health consequences, live in a parallel world. And yet, being in the kingdom of Morpheus, you can kill enemies, move in time and even commit suicide. Scientists have found that some scenarios of night dreams can indicate the presence of mental disorders. What exactly?

bipolar affective disorder

Violation is characterized by a sharp, cardinal change of mood and is accompanied by manic-depressive state of health. People with this disorder tend to describe their visions in great detail.

1. Dreams lasting for weeks, up to several years. They are like serial films. 1 dream — 1 series. A dream, ending at a certain frame, then begins with it.
2. Manic dreams. In a dream, a person may experience indescribable, all-encompassing grief, or vice versa. Everything is colorful, lively, bright, memorable.

Schizophrenia

Patients burdened with schizophrenia, no matter what form and course, have vivid dreams full of incredible events. The more severe the form of the disease, the more confusing the storylines of night dreams.

1. Realism of dreams. Waking up, for some time the individual cannot understand whether the experienced episodes occurred in reality or not.
2. All dreams are decorated with rich flowers. Research data show that schizophrenics have the brightest night visions 25 times more often than people with a normally functioning psyche.
3. Repetition of the dream plot for a certain period of time. For example, the subject can constantly see a dream where he plunges underground, falling into hell. Or ascends to Heaven, falling into Paradise.
4. Typical scenarios for schizophrenics are life moments that make you experience long-forgotten emotions, but the content is illogical, say: cars and people move backwards, rain pours from the ground.
5. Psychotics often have dreams where they are able to observe themselves from the outside, for example, how they bury him, how he is born, how he sleeps, goes to kindergarten or goes to school.
6. The leader in terms of regularity are dreams, where a schizophrenic is frightened by frightening, creepy images that are not logically connected. Often, this is accompanied by scenes of brutal violence.

post-traumatic stress

From stress in its traditional sense, post-traumatic stress differs in the etiology of origin. It arises as a result of events that have become extremely psychotraumatic for the individual. One of the symptoms of such stress is nightmares.

1. The dreamer may feel like a violent criminal, an alien, an animal, and even a plant. In the two extreme cases, dreams are usually not accompanied by thoughts and speech. At the same time, the actions that unfold in a dream can be controlled by the wearer, which is surprising.
2. Feelings of inevitable misfortune, tragedy are a common scenario for the sleep of a person with post-traumatic syndrome. As a rule, a person tries to prevent trouble, for example, by running away from a cruel killer, but he cannot escape, because all his actions slow down a hundred times, and the surrounding space is seen as if through a cloudy glass or water column.
3. Dreams in which there is a single color. All surrounding objects and phenomena are painted, for example, only in red or yellow.
4. Also, with post-traumatic stress, you can often see how the subject sees only a fragmentary picture, part of something whole. Example: big listening ear, talking mouth, blinking eyes.
5. The ending of dreams is always identical, regardless of their content at the beginning and in the middle. In such dreams, the same images can come. And in most cases they are meaningless.
6. Another category of dreams that repeatedly visit people who have experienced a traumatic situation are stories where the events that caused the development of stress are repeated over and over again. For example, participants in hostilities dream about how they fight, shoot, hide in trenches, etc.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder

This syndrome is characterized by obsessive states, which cannot be resisted. Okr-shchik can perform the same action 100 times a day, while logically justifying his desire to perform it. For example: every 10 minutes he washes his hands with soap, believing that this is the only way he will protect himself from germs and infections. And even in a dream, such a state will not let him go.

1. It often happens when the dreamer feels himself to be an omnipotent, omnipotent being endowed with limitless, inhuman power. He may dream that he is the Lord, Satan, a powerful psychic or sorcerer.
2. Overly emotional dreams, in which the foreground is not so much events and actions as internal sensations of incredible strength and depth. It can be not only negative emotions (fear, panic, despair), but also positive ones (euphoria, joy, happiness).
3. Fighting anything is another popular option. Usually a person struggles with any of his habits or desires. After such dreams, a person has an unpleasant “aftertaste” and an acute sense of guilt appears, since he did not manage to win a victory within the framework of a dream.

Mental anesthesia

Partial loss of the ability to experience any emotions. This disorder is often referred to as emotional callousness. But this pathological condition is inherent in people not only during wakefulness, but also during sleep.

1. In sleep, the patient can perceive events and his own actions through the eyes of others. At the same time, he does not lose the opportunity to feel his own «I». There is also the ability to have total control over one’s dream, when the dreamer can give advice to himself and even wake himself up.
2. Plots accompanied by depersonalization, when a mentally ill person perceives close people and familiar places / phenomena / objects as something unfamiliar, alien to him.
3. Inadequate behavior when some events occur with the dreamer to which he reacts differently than a healthy one. For example, he will be attacked by a bloodthirsty monster who wants to kill him. But the dreamer does not feel horror, on the contrary, he rejoices and enjoys.
4. Feeling of sleep. Being in a dream and being its main person involved, the person is fully aware that he is dreaming. This position is in many ways similar to lucid dreaming. But, unlike mentally healthy people who need to make an effort, sometimes a lot, to experience a lucid dream, those with mental anesthesia syndrome do not need to do anything.
5. The patient often dreams where he loses his inner «I», all emotions and feelings leave him. And the soul flies out of the body shell. Complete destruction with the presence of reason, through which the dreamer understands what is happening to him. A frequent scenario of such dreams is a repeatedly repeated death. Emotions are terrible: a person may not feel his body, not feel moisture while in the water, not recognize his own reflection in the mirror.

Chronic depression

The symptoms of ordinary depression are difficult to identify. But, if the condition has become chronic, it is not difficult to notice it. The suspect loses interest, they become indifferent: food, hobbies, loved ones. Usually chronic depression is accompanied by nightmares.

1. Dreams, where a person can perceive himself in two mutually exclusive hypostases. For example: can feel dead and alive at the same time, burning in fire and drowning in water, deaf and hearing. Also, it is possible not only to generate such dreams, but also to subject them to a thorough analysis, being turned off and realizing that this is a dream.
2. Dream kaleidoscope. Example: he dreams that he goes to bed, falls asleep and observes a certain dream. It turns out, a dream within a dream. In the same dungeon, he may dream about how he wakes up, thinking that he woke up in reality, but in fact he is still sleeping.
3. Indescribable nightmares with the experience of powerful negative emotions. Dreams are so realistic and emotionally strong that, upon waking up, the patient does not immediately realize that it was just a dream.
4. It often happens when a dreamer sees dead people appearing before him in the guise of the living. And if the understanding comes that the dead are in front of him, the living immediately take on the appearance of dead people.

Mental disorders can be hidden and practically not manifest. Therefore, it is important to keep track of what stories you often watch.