Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Essays about sleep terrors
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Essays about sleep terrors
Dreams are stories and images that our minds create while we sleep. They can be entertaining, fun, romantic disturbing, frightening, and sometimes bizarre. Adults mostly concern about frightening dreams and how to avoid them. Nightmares and night terrors are known as the most prominent bad dreams. Although nightmares and sleep terrors (night terrors) are more common among children, adults have them as well. When adults wake up terrified in the middle of the night, they may think they are the only adult who suffer from bad dreams, but they are not. Night terrors and nightmares awaken people scared in the night, and can be caused by several factors and basic disorders. Nightmares in adults may be spontaneous or be triggered by thinking about a difficult issue, having a late-night snack, or an allergy. Nightmares usually happen at deep sleep phase, during rapid eye movement (REM). Having Night terrors usually happen just before the REM at slow-wave sleep phase, after about one and a half hour after falling asleep, and involve great horror or danger. These terrors can happen in several member of a family, there is a solid family and genetic link. Sleep terrors also can be made of some negative emotional events, which affect your mind greatly. Night terrors also often connected to anxiety and depressive disorders, which cause temporarily unresponsiveness, confusion, disorientation, amnesia, or dreamer may do some dangerous actions. In the worst case, these terrors has serious and even fatal effects. The dreamers try to escape from bed or to fight, which hurt dreamer consequently. These will affect the individual’s relationship with others as well. To conclude, nightmares are not only the roots of scary dreams, but also sleep terrors are main causes of fearsome dreams. People in any age of their lives may experience bad dreams, which has mental reasons mainly. No one is an exception in a stressful
3f. when I have nightmares I tend to dream of person versus supernatural conflict. I have these awful dreams about my great grandmother’s spirit coming after me and attacking me. Sometimes I am so scared to go to bed that I try to force myself to stay
Dreams... are truly made of you. They show your deepest fears and wildest moments ... maybe even things from the future.
As stated in the text book, hallucination during Sleep Paralysis also occurs due to the sudden high blood pressure in the human brain and the change in the membrane potential of the neurons in the visual and/or auditory cortex. What this means is that one person starts to feel fear or terror when under the state of paralysis, it causes the blood pressure in the brain to increase. The emotion of fear is stated to be perceived in a structure called amygdala in the brain. The amygdala tends to be a small structure which is deep inside the brain and has several distinct nuclei which are the following: medial, lateral, basal, and central. According to the article “Sleep paralysis episode frequency and number, types, and structure of associated hallucinations”, the lateral nucleus seems to receive input from thalamus and cortical sensory and association areas. Then after this happens, the basolateral nucleus integrate the input as fear and send the information to the central nucleus, from which a major output transmits through projections to the hypothalamus and brainstem autonomic areas.
The discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep suggested that sleep was not, as it was thought to be, a dormant state but rather a mentally dynamic one. Your brain is, in fact, very active in this state, almost to the level at which it is when a person is awake. Yet during this active stage in which most dreams occur, the movements of the rest of the body are completely stilled. To imagine this paralysis during dreams not occurring is a frightful image, since in many cases dreams are violent and active. When the neurotransmitters that control the movement of the body do not work properly the person develops REM sleep behavioral disorder (RBD).
According to the history, Sleep Paralysis was classified as nightmare, a term that evolved into our modern definition by Samuel Johnson. It was widely considered to be the work of the demons, which were thought to sit on the chest of the sleeper. Various forms of magic and spiritual possession were also advanced as causes. But Sleep Paralysis can occur in the state between REM sleep, where dreaming occurs, and waking up. During REM sleep, the brain paralyses the body in order to keep us away from carrying out our dream-actions that could harm ourselves somehow. At times, our brain does not put off these dreams or the paralysis that comes along with them, resulting in a potentially terrifying experience. Sleep paralysis had been linked to disorders such as migraines, anxiety disorders, and obstructive sleep apnea. But when linked to another disorder, sleep paralysis commonly occurs together with the neurological sleep disorder called Narcolepsy. David McCarty, a sleep researcher at Louisiana State Health University, explained that in sleep paralysis, two of the key REM sleep components are presen...
Dreams are still a mystery, it's the unconscious that is in control of the mind the individuals could just sleep and watch the vision play out in their mind. Dreams could be a whole world in the mind of a person who will then write stories about it and share them to others. They show the answers to the person who needs them the most and will need to find ways to understand their own dreams by identifying the symbols by going back and thinking about their dreams. Having people write out their dreams in a book, they will easily be able to see what they need to work on. The dark side of a person will come out in the unconscious mind trying to overtake the person in making them do things like showing aggression to others however, by understanding the person dark side by listening to the shadow self, one will be able to control it. Dreams can solve any problems like having full acceptance of oneself, not just the conscious side but also the unconscious to fully accept the whole
Dreams are series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person’s mind during sleep. Dreams occur during a certain stage of sleep known as REM. Several different psychologists, including Freud and Hobson, have studied dreams. Psychologists have provided many theories as to what dreams are and the meanings behind them.
Dreams are stories and images that our minds create while we sleep; they can be entertaining, fun, romantic, disturbing, frightening, and sometimes bizarre. Adults mostly concern about frightening dreams and how to avoid them. Nightmares and night terrors are known as the most prominent bad dreams, although nightmares and sleep terrors (night terrors) are more common among children, but adults have them as well. When adults wake up terrified in the middle of the night, they may think they are the only adult who suffer from bad dreams, but they are not. Night terrors and nightmares awaken people scared in the night, and can be caused by several factors and basic disorders. Nightmares in adults may be spontaneous or be triggered by thinking about a difficult issue, having a late-night snack, or an allergy.
Parasomnia refers to a wide variety of disruptive, sleep-related events or, "disorders of arousal." These behaviors and experiences occur usually while sleeping, and most are often infrequent and mild. They may however happen often enough to become so bothersome that medical attention should be sought out. "Parasomnias are disorders characterized by abnormal behavior or physiological events occurring in association with sleep stages, or sleep-wake transitions."(DSM pg. 435)
Oprah Winfrey once said, “The best thing about dreams is that fleeting moment, when you are between asleep and awake, when you don't know the difference between reality and fantasy, when for just that one moment you feel with your entire soul that the dream is reality, and it really happened.” But, what actually is a dream and what do dreams really have to do with one’s everyday life? In essence, a dream is a series of mental images and emotions occurring during a slumber. Dreams can also deal with one’s personal aspirations, goals, ambitions, and even one’s emotions, such as love and hardship. However, dreams can also give rise to uneasy and terrible emotions; these dreams are essentially known as nightmares.
Many people suffer from bad dreams, often referred to as nightmares, every night. It is not uncommon to experience fright filled slumber from time to time, but some people are inclined to suffer more often than an occasional bad dream. While some mental health professionals believe nightmares reduce mental tensions by allowing the mind to act out its fears, new research suggests that bad dreams are more likely to increase anxiety in everyday life. In addition to life’s anxieties, what other factors contribute to nightmares and why?
According to a survey, about 5 to 10 percent of adults have nightmares once a month or more frequently. In my case, I kept dreaming about failing the exam when I was preparing for entering university. This kind of dreams which are repeated with same patterns is called recurring dreams. Generally, recurring dreams have a tendency to appear in a form of nightmare, and most of the people who experience these dreams are suffered from negative feelings such as fear and anxiety. However, suffering from recurring dreams can be prevented by a typical process. That process is, perceiving a dream by writing down a dream journal, exercising self-discipline during the day, and finally controlling dreams.
Dreams are an interesting topic of research primarily because they are so mysterious. To truly understand dreams we need to know why we dream, what dreams are, and what dreams mean. Dreams consist of emotions, images, feelings, and memories from our past, present and possibly even our future. Some scientists believe that dreams are the result of strong feelings or stress. However, dreams can also be caused by thinking about certain topics or people, thus causing the person to dream about that topic or person.
Usually when you end up drifting off to sleep, you fall into a deep sleep and begin to experience a so called dream.” However, most children, and even some adults, experience some even more terrifying so called dreams. These dreams are called nightmares. Nightmares have been occurring in people’s sleep for hundreds of years. People have been interested in them for centuries and they have quite an interesting past to them.
First, let examined the definition of dream according to Sigmund Freud “dream is the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish. Dreams are constructed like a neurotic symptom: they are compromises between the demands of a repressed impulse and the resistance of a censoring force in the ego” (Freud, 28). This simple means that all dreams represent the fulfilment of a wish by the dreamer. Dreams are the mind way of keeping an individual asleep and to digest and work out all that we have going on inside our brains, the negative, positive, fear and unclear thoughts and actions. This set the framework for dream work. Freud also stresses that even anxiety dreams and nightmares are expressions of unconscious desire. Freud further went on to say that, “the general function of dreaming is to fending off, by a kind of soothing action, external or internal stimuli which would tend to arose the sleeper, and thus of securing sleep against interpretation” (Freud, 28). With this, it shows that a dreamer can take apart his dream and analysis it, if he or she remembers, once conscious.