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Nightmares

I used to have regular dreams of me looking up to the sky to see a jet airliner heading towards earth and crashing a few miles away.
Not had them for a couple of years or so.
 
Personally when I wake up from a nightmare, I hide under the duvet, because everyone knows duvets are impervious to monsters. But I suppose that's not very cinematic or televisual.
Not cinematic? Oh! But it could be! Envision this: you wake scared, knowing you did not have a nightmare, there really is a monster. You dive under the duvet, which you believe is monster proof. While under the duvet, you grab your phone so you can call for help. The wan light of your phone screen lights your face with its eerie glow, but is swallowed up in shadow as it recedes into folds of the duvet. From the shadowy regions of the duvet, there comes a slight quivering motion and a slithering noise—is it you, or is it the MONSTER!!!
 
Pretty good, but I don't have a phone! Guess me and the monster would have to snuggle up sight unseen...
 
Isn't a nightmare simply a regular dream that sooner or later leads into a stressful scenario or dangerous incident?

I've had a lot of dreams that ended as nightmares, but I don't recall having any dreams that began as nightmarish.
 
Isn't a nightmare simply a regular dream that sooner or later leads into a stressful scenario or dangerous incident?

I've had a lot of dreams that ended as nightmares, but I don't recall having any dreams that began as nightmarish.

That's right, my nightmares always start with me wandering around as usual in my dreams, but the nightmares end with a big spider jumping at me all of a sudden, for instance.
 
Isn't a nightmare simply a regular dream that sooner or later leads into a stressful scenario or dangerous incident?

I've had a lot of dreams that ended as nightmares, but I don't recall having any dreams that began as nightmarish.
This is my experience as well.

What a great thread! Thanks, @Zeke Newbold, for starting it. I was especially interested in the responses from people who practice lucid dreaming and meditation. My husband, BTW, has effortlessly lucid dreamed most of his life. I am so envious.

I have had only a few nightmares, as far as I remember, in my life. My bad dream problem is lifelong; it is having stress dreams most nights of my life. The settings, characters, and story are all different, but the same problem – having to make a decision and not knowing what to do – remains. It seems my subconscious has existential problems.

My worst nightmare is that I have morphed, unwillingly but with full awareness, into my mother. I will wake up screaming and shouting from that one. In real life, she was a deeply troubled person whom I disliked very much.
 
Having recently had a dream which could have been a nightmare (lost in a city, trying to get home) but wasn't, maybe the difference between nightmare and ordinary dream is 'tone', and maybe some of this is down to interpretation by the waking mind.

So, for example, I could have a dream about being chased by a monster and just be mildly irritated that I couldn't get where I wanted to go because of this bloody monster that kept chasing me around, or I could be rendered terrified, scared of what the monster would do if it caught me and that I couldn't get to safety. Also, I have no fear of snakes, so a dream featuring being knee deep in snakes wouldn't be scary, just mildly puzzling.
 
When I was a child I would often dream that the ground would open and I would fall down. Eventually this became many levels that I fell down and I was always afraid.
Eventually in the last one I remember I fell down all the levels until I was swallowed by a shark.
But when I was inside I found others also there and I felt quite safe and never had the dream again.
 
I havent had a nightmare since childhood, they stopped when i learned to switch what was happening in my nightmares to something nice, the way i thought about it at the time was like switching the channel on a tv, idk if this would be classed as lucid dreaming, however im quite adept at lucid dreaming now but the memory of my dreams dissipates within minutes of waking.
 
I havent had a nightmare since childhood, they stopped when i learned to switch what was happening in my nightmares to something nice, the way i thought about it at the time was like switching the channel on a tv, idk if this would be classed as lucid dreaming, however im quite adept at lucid dreaming now but the memory of my dreams dissipates within minutes of waking.
There seem to be two meanings of 'lucid dream' current - one is the dream in which you know you are dreaming and can manipulate events, the other usage (which seems to be more common and irritates me beyond belief because it's not what I mean or understand by 'lucid dreaming') is dreams that are very clear and remembered until morning.
 
Ok. As to the ‘why’ in the question. I think the brain has to continually retrain and check the progress of responses to external stimuli. The most basic test is of course fight or flight so I suspect the brain is chucking up weird, different and surprising scenarios to self-test the survival instinct.
 
My wife gets mysterious night terrors which are different from nightmares.

Not at all understood and complicated, when my wife snaps out the terror, she does not remember a thing as nothing at all happened.

Supposedly with nightmares, people can remember what their nightmare was about, not so with night terrors.
 
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My wife gets mysterious night terrors which are different from nightmares.
Not at all understood and complicated, when my wife snaps out the terror, she does not remember a thing as nothing at all happened.
Supposedly with nightmares, people can remember what their nightmare was about, not so with night terrors.

Night terrors / sleep terrors are now known to occur early during the sleep cycle, while the sleeper is in slow-wave delta sleep rather than rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (which is when we dream). That's why night terrors aren't associated with dreaming at all. They're more of a gut-level / sub-cognitive panic reaction.
 
I can't remember ever having had a nightmare or really scary dream.

Edit: I'm repeating myself. I already said this earlier in the thread.
 
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I dream pretty vividly but they just tend to be weird rather than scary. I have had nightmares in the past - two in particular stick in my mind - just not for a while.
 
Recent Swiss research suggests the frequency of nightmares experienced by people plagued with nightmare disorders can be decreased with two simple strategies - one of which is playing a sound the patient has been conditioned to associate with positive memories.
Nightmares Can Be Silenced With a Single Piano Chord, Scientists Discover

Using non-invasive techniques to manipulate our emotions, it might be possible to curtail the screaming horrors that plague our sleep.

A study conducted on 36 patients diagnosed with a nightmare disorder showed that a combination of two simple therapies reduced the frequency of their bad dreams.

Scientists invited the volunteers to rewrite their most frequent nightmares in a positive light and then playing sound associated with positive experiences as they slept.

"There is a relationship between the types of emotions experienced in dreams and our emotional well-being," says psychiatrist Lampros Perogamvros of the Geneva University Hospitals and the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

"Based on this observation, we had the idea that we could help people by manipulating emotions in their dreams. In this study, we show that we can reduce the number of emotionally very strong and very negative dreams in patients suffering from nightmares."

Many people suffer from nightmares, which aren't always a simple case of a few bad dreams. Nightmares are also associated with poor-quality sleep, which in turn is linked with a whole plethora of other health issues.

Poor sleep can also increase anxiety, which in turn can result in insomnia and nightmares. Recent studies have shown that nightmares and sleep disturbances have seen an uptick during the ongoing global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Given that we don't really understand why, or even how, our brain creates dreams while we sleep, treating chronic nightmares is something of a challenge. ...
FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/nightm...with-a-single-piano-chord-scientists-discover
 
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Recent Swiss research suggests the frequency of nightmares experienced by people plagued with nightmare disorders can be decreased with two simple strategies - one of which is playing a sound the patient has been conditioned to associate with positive memories.

FULL STORY: https://www.sciencealert.com/nightm...with-a-single-piano-chord-scientists-discover
I listen to audio books and have them running through the night to keep me asleep. I often have nightmares (and very very random dreams) when I run a book I am not thoroughly familiar with. The other night I was listening to Shadowlands by Matthew Green (excellent, thoroughly recommend) and I had some terrifying dreams that jolted me awake.

Despite the title, it's not a scary book, it's about visiting lost places in the landscape.
 
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this could be a possible breakthrough in the field of psychology.
It also adds weight to the view that dreams represent perceptible side-effects of memory processes occurring during sleep.
 
Enola very well put, and I mean it. We've discussed this in therapy
 
I’ve always had vivid dreams as long as I remember and I know I use all my senses in them too, even taste and smell. I can still recall a frightening dream I used to have a lot as a young kid, why ever I dreamt what I did I have no idea as we weren’t a religious family. I’d dream I was fast asleep and something would wake me, in my dream I opened my eyes and there on my bedroom wall was a giant image of Christ, arms outstretched looking towards me, almost as if he was beckoning me. For some reason the image terrified me and I’d jump out of bed, run out my room and into my parents room where I’d slip, go sliding across the floor and bang my head on their bedside table. The banging of my head in my dream always made me wake up.

The nightmares I have as an adult usually involve something which frightens me in real life like heights or spiders, or it’ll be a really creepy dream where I’m fighting a malevolent presence.
 
https://12ft.io/proxy?&q=https://ww...com/article/how-dreams-reveal-brain-disorders

Are there specific qualities that characterize the nightmares of depressed people?

In depression, dreams are very negative, mirroring the mental state of depressed people during the day. This parallel was brought to light in the early 2000s by researcher Dieter Riemann and his colleagues at the University of Freiburg in Germany. By analyzing the dreams of depressed patients treated with antidepressants, they discovered that as the treatment began to take effect after several weeks, the content of these dreams became less and less gloomy, and the mood of the patients improved.

At first glance, one might think that the overall tone of the dreams reflects the depressed state of the patient. But things are not so simple, unfortunately, because in the first weeks of treatment, antidepressants often suppress REM sleep—the phase when we dream the most—and it usually takes a month for patients to remember their dreams again. It’s difficult to understand the link between dreams and depression and to know which of the two is influencing the other. To better understand this link, we can study two categories of dreamers—those who have what are called lucid dreams and people with REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD).

. . . . .

In general, do people with Parkinson’s have different sorts of dreams?

According to a 2011 study at Egas Moniz Hospital in Lisbon, their dreams have a more aggressive tone and more often involve animals. In addition, the unusual qualities of their dreams appear to correspond to damage in their frontal lobes.

Much more in the article.
 
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