Nightmares: What They Are And Why They Appear (causes)
We spend a good part of our lives sleeping, which is not surprising considering the large amount of energy we must replenish to cope with everyday life. However, there are times when the stage of sleep, which we usually associate with calm and well-being, transforms into a hell from which we desperately try to escape.
And it is that what we know as nightmares It has come to exert such a strong impact on humanity that a long time ago it stopped being a simple unpleasant experience that we experience individually and became a source of all kinds of mythologies or, directly, the definition of what we want to escape from. . In fact, we use the word “nightmare” to refer to any highly unpleasant or traumatic experience, equating the real to what only happened in our head.
However… What are nightmares and what causes them? Let’s see it.
Nightmares are a state of anxiety and agitation that appears at the moment of dreaming often associated with images and sensations that cause fear, sadness or any other negative emotion, in such an intense way that sleep interruption is generated.
Thus, it is considered that a bad dream does not become a nightmare if it does not causes us to wake up or reach a state of consciousness between sleep and wakefulness.
This sudden break with sleep occurs easily, since the REM phase, which is what happens while we sleep and dream (that is, when when sleeping we are at the same time in a state of consciousness directed inwards, not outwards), it is the stage of sleep that most resembles wakefulness based on the activation patterns of the neurons in that state. moment. A little “push” can take us back to the real world.
Like everything surrounding the study of dreams, there is little that is known for sure about the causes of nightmares. But there are several things on which there is consensus.
The first thing to know is that it is very unlikely that there is a single cause that explains the existence of nightmares. This, which is applicable to practically any psychological process, in the case of nightmares is reflected in the effect that various elements have on the frequency of appearance of these unpleasant experiences. For example, leading a busy and stressful lifestyle causes them to appear more frequently and alcohol addiction has a similar effect, making what we dream tend to be more unpleasant and anxiety-inducing.
On the other hand, there is another certain thing about nightmares: Sigmund Freud was wrong about its origin. For the father of psychoanalysis, the nightmare is what happens when a part of the unconscious emerges into the dream state without us being able to repress its contents, which is why we have been forced to keep those ideas, memories or beliefs sealed. The state of anxiety produced by the fact that we begin to see what we want to continue ignoring makes us feel compelled to wake up to make these types of revelations stop.
Why do we know this does not happen? Among other things, because the theories on which Sigmund Freud relied to provide this explanation to the phenomenon are not valid, since they are based on speculations about case studies. There are no parts of our mind that try to hide certain contents and prevent them from emerging into consciousness, there are simply contents that at a given moment are not relevant enough to make our attention reach them.
Taking into account that Freudian ideas about nightmares do not help to understand the nature of this type of experiences… What are nightmares for?
Some theories suggest that nightmares have no use, and are a consequence of evolution that has not been promoted by natural selection as an advantageous trait; They are simply there, and they are harmless enough that the genes that make them possible do not disappear over the generations.
Other theories, however, do attribute a utility to nightmares. Specifically, they point out that Its presence in our daily lives can make us prepare for stressful events, maintaining a certain state of anxiety that will be useful to us in the short term to overcome specific obstacles, and that appear when there is something in our forecasts that worries us. In this way, the nightmare would be a kind of mental training to enter a state of alert more easily and, consequently, react quickly.
However, in some cases the possible usefulness of nightmares would not outweigh the harm they cause, so we enter into a vicious cycle of stress and anxiety that negatively impacts our health. In any case, most people are not significantly affected by the appearance of nightmares, since they do not usually occur very frequently and, although in many cases what is seen in them is very disturbing, it is not It is experienced with the same rawness with which it would be lived if it were real.
