A nightmare can ruin the tranquility of sleep, but nightmares are more than just bad dreams. Find out what causes bad dreams, how to make them stop for good, and the meaning of some common nightmares.
Sleep is supposed to be blissful, comforting, and rejuvenating, but sometimes it's not. Sometimes you have horrifying dreams that disrupt your slumber, keep you awake, and make you wonder if the bad dream is portending something horrible that will soon come to pass. Join Mysticsense to learn about those terrible dreams we call nightmares. Find out what nightmares are, the problems they can cause, and some reasons why nightmares occur. Find out five of the most common nightmares, what they mean, and how to tell if a nightmare will come true. Finally, find out how to end nightmares once and for all so your sleep can be peaceful and healing.
What’s a Nightmare?
A nightmare is a frightening dream. The word nightmare comes from the old English word referring to a creature that torments people with bad dreams. It originally referred to sleep paralysis caused by a supernatural being. It was believed that a creature would visit you in your sleep and sit on your chest. In parts of Canada and from Gulla people of Georgia in the Carolinas in the United States it is believed that a hag leaves her body at night in spirit form to terrorize humans. The hag’s victims awaken paralyzed in a sense of terror and fight very hard to wake up, fearing the hag will suffocate them to death. In Arabic nations, they have a similar creature called the ja-thoom. It is a malevolent spirit that sits on top of people and chokes them in their sleep. However, if you sleep on your right side or read the Throne Verse of the Quran before sleep, you are protected. In Turkey, Persia, and throughout South Asia there is a belief that similar creatures exist.
Modern medicine says nightmares are bad dreams that elicit a powerful emotional response. Your body can't always tell the difference between a dream and waking life, and the stress that you experience in the dream feels like the stress that you experience if it's really happening to you while you're awake. Psychology Today shares some disturbing statistics about nightmares. They say that about 1 in 20 people have nightmares weekly. People who worry more often have worse nightmares and people who sleep longer and more often have more nightmares than people who don't. Read more from Psychology Today: 15 Frightful Facts About Nightmares | Psychology Today
What Problems Do Nightmares Cause?
Nightmares don't necessarily just give you problems while you're asleep. They cause problems when you're awake also. Sleep deprivation can be triggered by nightmares and it can impair your functioning during the day. It can also give you anxiety if the contents of the dream are especially distressing.
Sleep Deprivation
When you lose sleep, it can cause medical problems like depression and heart disease. It can also affect your weight. When you're tired you're going to be less physically active, meaning that you burn less calories and you can pack on weight. Stress can drive up your heart rate and blood pressure and prolonged elevations in these levels can create heart disease. Sleep deprivation doesn't trigger clinical depression but it can make you feel depressed. When you don't feel good your mood deteriorates and gives you a dismal outlook on life. Nightmares can make you fearful, but fear isn't always a bad thing. Find out why here: Why Fears Are Good Sometimes
Anxiety
Sometimes we have bad dreams about things that we're already worried about, and dreaming about those things makes us think about it even more. The more we think about things that frighten us, the more anxious we become. It is not unusual to worry that a nightmare is warning you about something bad that is about to happen. It is estimated that about 301 million people worldwide have anxiety and in the United States alone close to 19% of adults have it. Even if you don't struggle with anxiety disorder, a nightmare that's scary enough can make you anxious.
Impaired Functioning
Something happens to our bodies while we're having nightmares. We can experience the stress response of fight or flight and wake up exhausted. We might also wake up from a nightmare and have difficulty going back to sleep. We might be exhausted but not want to go back to sleep because we are afraid of experiencing another nightmare. This can impair your functioning during the day. When you're tired, it's difficult to concentrate and your performance levels will drop. If this continues, you can have chronic sleep deprivation which causes memory lapses, possible hallucinations, decreased immune system functioning, an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, irregular heart rate and risk of heart disease, and in children it can even suppress growth. Read about some spiritual dreams and their meanings here; How to Interpret Dreams Spiritually
Why Do We Have Nightmares?
Nightmares are not unusual and a few things can trigger them. If we're under an excessive amount of stress about something, that can trigger nightmares. Things that we eat or drink can give us nightmares. Medical problems can give us nightmares also.
Stress or Worry
Stress from daytime can still be processed in our brains while we're sleeping. Rapid eye movement sleep, or REM sleep, is a period of sleep when dreams can occur. Our brain can replay stressful experiences or memories during this time which can trigger nightmares. Chronic stress increases our likelihood to have chronic nightmares. There are a few things that you can do to keep stress from triggering nightmares though. Wind down before bed by relaxing, meditating, or journaling. Relaxation techniques such as deep breathing, reading scriptures or motivational writings, or using positive affirmations can reduce the amount of stress that you feel before a bed.
Diet
Believe it or not, what you eat can make you have nightmares. Excessive alcohol consumption can trigger nightmares and eating heavy greasy foods especially right before bed can trigger nightmares. Spicy foods, curry, and chocolate right before bed can make it hard to sleep and also make you have very powerful nightmares. Eating a lot of sugar before bed can make your blood sugar spike and then drop which can cause sleep disturbances and nightmares. High fat foods can slow your digestion down and make your stomach uncomfortable, which can trigger nightmares. High caffeine levels can trigger nightmares and high starch food can spike your sugars and make you have nightmares. Read about the spiritual meaning of fruit and dreams: Fruit Meanings in Dreams | A Spiritual Guide
Medical Conditions
Certain medical conditions can give us nightmares also. Psychiatric issues ranging from depression to anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder can trigger hefty nightmares. Physical medical problems such as asthma can too.
Mental
Depression, anxiety or other psychiatric conditions can increase the risk of nightmares. The National Library of Medicine released an article with some startling facts. Chronic nightmares affect about 70% of people who have a diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorders or personality disorders. They report that “ Nightmares are associated with increased psychological distress, worse physical health outcomes, and increased risk of self-harm and suicide.“ Chronic issues from bad dreams can create sleep disturbance that can depress your level of functioning and increase sleep complaints. When you lose sleep it negatively impacts your mental health. That can make you feel hopeless and depressed. Read more about what they had to say here: Nightmares in Patients with Major Depressive Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, and Psychotic Disorders: A Systematic Review - PMC
Physical
Breathing issues during sleep like sleep apnea or asthma can trigger nightmares. Think of it- if you are struggling to breathe while you are sleeping, your stressed body will create nightmares. Asthma sufferers report three times the amount of nightmares as non asthma sufferers and sleep apnea creates nightmares as well. Cleveland Clinic has some suggestions to help asthma sufferers at night. One thing that can trigger asthma breathing issues at night is sleeping position. Repositioning and using something like a wedge pillow can open airways, and reduce breathing issues brought on by asthma. It can make nightmares a thing of the past! Read more here: Nocturnal Asthma: Symptoms and Why It Happens
Common Nightmares
If you're having nightmares you might be having similar nightmares to what other people have. Some of the most common nightmares entail fears of horrible things that could happen. These things include falling, dealing with death, being chased or attacked or discovering that you are naked in public. Read on to find out the meanings of these dreams.
Dreams About Falling
Dreams about falling indicate anxiety about feeling vulnerable or failure. When you've started a new job, when you've lost a relationship, or moved to a new place, life can seem uncertain. It's not unusual to feel anxious and worried that things will go badly. Dreams about falling can indicate that you are feeling helpless or that things are unstable and that you may be unable to help yourself if there is a disaster.
Dreams of Death
If you dream about someone who you love dying, it can indicate that you're afraid of losing them. If you dream that you die, it can indicate that you feel that your safety is threatened but it can also mean something much deeper. Dreams about death in general can deal with transformation or an end of a way of being. Dreams about dead animals can deal with processing grief.
Dreams of Being Chased
Dreams about being chased or trying to get away from somebody in any situation can indicate that you are worried about a situation or feeling saddled with some type of responsibility you don't want. Dreams of being chased can indicate that you're feeling overwhelmed with something in your life and you just want to get away from it. Nightmares of being chased can make you feel powerless. Take control and defeat powerlessness. Find out how here: Overcome Powerlessness and Take Command of Life
Dreams About Being Naked
Dreams about being naked in public indicate feelings of embarrassment or vulnerability. These dreams can happen especially during times of being tested and having to prove ourselves. Worrying that you don't have what it takes to rise to the challenge can trigger dreams about being naked in public. The fear of having embarrassing secrets exposed can drive us to trying to ensure our personal privacy, and the thought of having that privacy taken away is terrifying.
Dreams of Being Attacked
When you dream about being attacked, it can mean that you don't feel safe in a certain situation in life, and that's manifesting in dreams about being attacked. Dreams about being attacked by an animal or a violent person can show up when we feel unsafe or when we're worried that something may harm us.
Will Nightmares Come True?
That all depends. Are you somebody who has psychic dreams- meaning do you dream about things before they happen in real life? If your psychic abilities allow you to do this, any dream you have might come true. A lot of times, a nightmare is just a dream and it's not going to happen. Some people dream about the things that they're the most afraid of happening and other people just have strange dreams that they find disturbing. If you don't have the psychic ability to have dreams about things that haven't happened yet, don't worry about your nightmares coming true. They probably won't. Are you psychic? Find out here: What Does It Mean To Be Psychic?
How to Make Nightmares Stop
There are a few simple techniques that you can use to make your nightmares stop. Relaxation before bed can reduce the risk of nightmares as well as addressing whatever issues are going on in life that might worry you in your sleep. If these things don't work, you may have a medical issue and your doctor can help you with that.
Relaxation
Journaling about stress, getting enough exercise during the day to help you decompress or drinking lavender or chamomile tea can relax you and get you ready for a blissful sleep. A simple meditation where you tell yourself that the stress of your day is over before sleep may be all you need to relax.
Address Issues
Stressful issues that are unresolved before bedtime can keep you up at night or give you bad dreams. So, do whatever you can to resolve issues before bed. If you've had a fight with your friend, make up with them. Speak with your noisy neighbors asking them to keep loud sounds down at night. Tell your nosy sibling to mind their own business so that you don't go to sleep upset. Peaceful resolutions to stressful situations can help with peaceful sleep.
See Your Doctor
There is no substitute for a good doctor. Medications can trigger nightmares and your doctor can adjust your medication dosage and make the nightmares stop. Illness, or your diet can trigger nightmares and your doctor can give you solutions to those. Sometimes we can handle our nightmares on our own, but other times our doctor can team up with us to defeat our nightmares.
Nightmares come out of nowhere and can wreck your sleep and ruin how you feel the next day. They're pretty common and can happen to anyone. They can happen because we're stressed, because we have some kind of medical problem, or because of something that we ate or drank. Some of the most common nightmares are of being attacked or of falling. Nightmares don't have to rule our lives though. Relaxation techniques or addressing any issues that cause us to worry in our dreams can end your nightmares. Remember though, sometimes there is a physical problem for nightmares and your doctor can help with that. You deserve to have the sweetest, most pleasant dreams. May all your dreams be peaceful and any nightmares you have become a thing of the past.
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