The moment of fear you feel when being pursued by a veiled murderer, running for your life through a gloomy side street. You cry and yell out for help but no one can hear you. You collapse, and before you know it, the veiled murderer is standing directly in front of you. He pulls out an ax and you wake up saturated in perspiration, realizing it was all just a nightmare. We all have experienced a nightmarish moment, maybe more than once. Nightmares can be very disconcerting because nightmares are hard to understand. What produces a nightmare and why does a nightmare acts a certain way? Most people think nightmares are nothing more than just a wicked dream, a meek nightmare to wake up from in the morning, or debauched dream that will be gone by the time they eat breakfast. With every nightmare, there is a reason for beginning.
A nightmare is a vision with negative emotions. According to Psychology Today, “A nightmare is a dream occurring during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep that results in feelings of strong terror, fear, distress or extreme anxiety. This phenomenon tends to transpire in the latter part of the night and often times awakens the sleeper, who is likely to recall the content of the dream.” The nightmares begin sometime in childhood and usually begins to lessen around or after the age of ten. For some people nightmares do not stop. Some people have nightmares their entire life. Nightmares do not usually last very long; not the whole night, like most people think. Yes, a dream or nightmare seems to last for hours, but think about it. Dreams or nightmares are only a small story told in a miniature amount of time. The mind has various dreams or nightmares every night, each one longer than the last. As the dreams be...
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...es can be dealt with in many ways. If a nightmare is caused by traumatic events, a therapist might help. Another way of avoiding a nightmare is to try to change the events that are happening and dream of a new ending.
In other words, nightmares are dreams with a lot of negative feelings. Fear and anxiety are the most common cause of nightmares. Remember, nightmares are not real, they are just dreams. There are multiple ways that can cause these nighttime scares. Something extremely traumatic to something as simple as a nighttime snack right before bed can cause a person to wake up trembling in the night.
Works Cited
“Nightmares”. Psychology Today. 13 May 2010. Web. 13 March 2014.
“Nightmare Causes”. Mayo Clinic. 12 August 2011. Web. 19 March 2014.
“Study of Dreams”. International Association for the Study of Dreams. 2013. Web. 19 March
2014.
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
Everybody dreams during his lifetime. It is a part of human nature that we experience almost everyday. Dreams can be lost memories, past events and even fantasies that we relive during our unconscious hours of the day. As we sleep at night, a new world shifts into focus that seems to erase the physical and moral reality of our own. It is an individual's free mind that is privately exposed, allowing a person to roam freely in his own universe. As we dream, it seems that we cannot distinguish right from wrong or normal from abnormal and, therefore, commit acts that we would not have done in a realistic society. Perhaps Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, describes the nature of dreams best. He contemplates the definition of insanity by saying, "... May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which is the sleeping life?" He is suggesting that our dreams display a sense of mindless behavior, and an insane person could be one who does not realize he is awake and thinks he is still dreaming. Alice, the main character in these two books, is caught in her own lapse of reality and sanity. She is engulfed in a mass of items and events that she has experienced in the real world that have conformed to the environment of her own imagination. They are brought to life in a distorted way in her imaginative world of Wonderland. Throughout these stories, Alice encounters characters and landscapes that are created from her own view on nature and the behavior of people as she knows it. Alice dreams of animals taking the roles of adults and a misshapen landscape of unusual foliage and shifting conditions in propo...
Have you ever woken up feeling like you’ve been to the end of the world and back, yet never left your bed? Or maybe you might have had all your worst fears realized when you were asleep? In that case, you were probably dreaming. Dreams are a “series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations occurring involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep” (The American Heritage High School Dictionary, 2004). Everyone has about three to seven dreams a night, but it has been estimated that we forget up to 95 percent of them ( Stevens 2011). Although no one really knows why we dream every night, it’s more likely than not a way for our brain to help us solve problems.
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.
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
Nightmares are defined as repeated awakenings from the major sleep period or naps with detailed recall of extended and extremely frightening dreams, usually involving threats to survival, security, or self-esteem. The awakenings generally occur during the second half of the sleep period also know as the REM stage of sleep (Psych Central, 2013). Nightmares affect all ages, but children seem to have such dreams more often. Nightmare disorder should not be confused with night terrors, for they have a different effect on the dreamer. Night terrors are episodes of panic and confusion, with difficulty walking or bringing to awareness, and of which the sufferer has no recollection (Kavanagh, 2010). Major differences between both is that nightmares are vivid images, while night terrors are feelings or emotions that can not be recollected. Also, as stated before, nightmares occur during the REM stage of sleep. In contrast, night terrors occur during the non-REM stage which happens within the first 3-4 hours of sleep. Although both nightmare and night terrors bring great discomfort to the individual, it is important to note that they are different disorders.
Though what could be considered a nightmare varies from person to person. Referring to the dream mentioned in the previous paragraph, someone might not find the shadowed figure as frightening, but another might be terrified, waking up suddenly from fear. What most people confuse nightmares with are known as night terrors. However, these two concepts are very different. A night terror is a type of sleep disruption, but instead of being a dream like nightmares, night terrors are caused by the central nervous system being over aroused. This is because the system is still maturing. Children will sometimes gain the over-arousal trait from genetics, almost 80% of family members of the child experienced sleepwalking or another sleeping disorder. (Night 7). Night terrors can be hard to witness as parents but they are not connected to a worse medical problem. Night terrors are also rare compared to nightmares, and occur more with young children. They may disappear as the child gets older. Night terrors are also normally forgotten after they happen, while a child may remember a nightmare. Another difference is that night terrors take place at a different time than nightmares. “Night terrors happen during deep non REM sleep. Unlike nightmares (which occur during REM sleep), a night terror is not technically a dream, but more like a sudden reaction of fear that happens during the transition from one sleep phase to another” (Night 4). What the child is experiencing is their nervous system becoming so over aroused during a sleep phase, that the body reacts, causing a night terror. Another difference between nightmares and night terrors, humans can over time develop a nightmare disorder. “Nightmare disorder is referred to by doctors as a Parasomnia — a type of sleep disorder that involves undesirable experiences that occur while you 're falling asleep, during sleep or when you 're waking up” (Nightmare 1). This kind of disorder
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.
Nightmares are dreams with extreme fear, horror, or anxiety. They affect people of all ages for many different reasons. Nightmares are often caused by one of three factors: stress, eating habits, or medication.
the dreams of your sleep can't be remembered, but endless nightmares always lurk within. 'The Nightmare'. It's a disease , no one and no thing can interfere it. The silence is always a sign. Deep thoughts and worries are also symptoms. It's contagious, but it can scar you for the afterlife. All of your body gets infected. The brain is the first stop. It leaves you feeling solitary. Lonely .Death toll, all of us. We've faced it before, but some of us just don't know how to get over the addiction. This is my disease. My fear. My suffering.
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.
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?
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.
All of us dream, several times at night. It is believed by some that we sleep in order that we may dream. Dreams can come true if somebody makes them true, as the saying goes, “A dream is just a dream, unless you make it come true”. Dreams provide us the actual picture of our thoughts. Dreams may tell us about any physical event which took place with us or which is going to happen with us. The dream is trying to inform the dreamer about his condition in any walk of life. Basically, we can dream about anything logical or illogical, fictious or non-fictious and reasonable or unreasonable.
As the body sleeps, reality becomes replaced with the dream world, a fanciful place where the innermost being is found cowering like a creature vying to be freed. Some people have vivid dreams that are life-like; others cannot recall having dreamed. One concept is for sure, the dream world is one where the mind runs a free course. Images buried deep inside, thoughts avoided throughout the day, and unrealistic situations take hold. These images may turn into a peaceful dream of amazement and wonder, or they may take a frightening turn, dragging the mind into a state of horror and dread. The situations can become all too real, grasping at the outer edges of the mind, pushing the dream over the boundaries the body normally allows.