Why do we dream and have nightmares? Do dreams have a specific purpose or should we not look too much into them? Nightmares in particular can have a major impact on people. We sleep badly, often wake up restless and with a bad feeling and drag the experienced dream with us all day long. Not nice. The question often haunts our minds:What does this nightmare want to tell or teach me? Is there a relationship between nightmares and how we react to scary situations in the waking world?
Every once in a while everyone suffers from it:a bad dream or nightmare (not to be confused with night terrors), which often also does not make sense. The main themes range from a long chase, a super awkward social situation or even a confrontation with death.
Besides a bad feeling and an unpleasant start to the day, there are often no long-lasting effects. We discuss the dream (in detail) with our friends and after a few days we have already forgotten the dream and we easily catch up on our sleep. Still interesting:Have our brains actually forgotten this nightmare or does the nightmare have some purpose or effect on our brains and behavior in the waking world? Several researchers have delved into the question of why we have nightmares and the results are interesting!
Sterpenich, Perogamvros, Tononi &Schwartz (2019) looked at the effect of nightmares on the brain and how the brain subsequently reacts in real life when these people are in threatening situations. For example, there are certain regions in the brain that are responsible for experiencing feelings of anxiety, namely the amygdala, the cingulate cortex and the insula. These areas are associated with experiencing different emotions. The brain regions and their activation are easy to study and measure by means of MRI. An MRI is a medical imaging technique that makes it possible to map body processes properly.
The researchers state that experiencing anxiety during a dream compared to experiencing anxiety in the waking world has an opposite effect on our brains. And that could explain why we have nightmares.
For example, feelings of fear during nightmares inhibit feelings of fear when we are awake and we are in a scary situation. Especially the insula is strongly activated during nightmares. The insula is a part of the brain that plays a central role in pain experiences and basic emotions such as fear and anger. In your nightmare you are, as it were, practicing your response to an anxiety-provoking stimulus “in real life”. In real life you then experience fewer feelings of fear. Your brain is trained while you sleep and this makes it much easier for you to deal with these scary stimuli in the waking world. Nightmares therefore have an emotion-regulating effect. How nice is that? . And that could just be the reason why we have nightmares.
So the next time you wake up drenched in sweat from a violent nightmare, you can reassure yourself that this nightmare will help you deal with fearful situations in real life. You've had another dress rehearsal;)!
Love, Dear
Source:research
