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Ultimate guide to banishing nightmares

Ultimate guide to banishing nightmares
Nearly 70 per cent of adults experience nightmares—with an amazing 30 per cent of us reporting that these terrifying dreams jerk us out of sleep as often as once a month. Here's how to stop the cycle. 
Cold blue chills run down your body. An electric charge snakes across your skin. Your pupils dilate. Your muscles tighten. You look into the darkness ahead and…and the next morning you have absolutely no idea what happened next. All you can remember is the sickening wash of fear as your mind was hijacked and held hostage by a nightmare.
Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Believe it or not, it’s not just our kids who have nightmares.
 

What triggers a nightmare?

Nightmares can be triggered by medications (particularly antidepressants, barbiturates, sedatives, sleeping pills, beta-blockers, catecholaminergic agents, and amphetamines), oddball genes, degenerative neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s, last night’s chilli, traumatic events in the present, never-healed wounds from the past that a recent event has unmasked, and gut-level threats to health, safety, and the very sense of who you are.
Those who put a lid on expressing how they feel in response to stressful events during the day are likely to be taken for a ride by those emotions in the form of nightmares at night. And some, particularly people who are open and sensitive, may have a “thin” boundary between what’s real and what’s a dream—which means that their waking life is more than likely to stir up their nightlife and cause some pretty hairy dreams.
"Nightmares are a cry for resolution"
“A nightmare is a dysfunctional dream,” explains Rosalind Cartwright, Ph.D., director of the sleep disorder service at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago. Instead of integrating the day’s events and feelings with older, stored memories and defusing negative emotions—which is what some researchers feel a dream is supposed to do—the emotions your brain is processing overload your circuits, prevent their integration into older memories and jerk you from sleep.
If you’re in a bad car accident, for example, you may not be able to process all the negative emotions the accident generates right away, says Dr. Cartwright. The fear and your sense of vulnerability and mortality are overwhelming. So you may have nightmares for a while as your mind keeps working away at integrating your feelings. Once it does, however, the nightmares go away.
As Dr. Cartwright eloquently writes in her book Crisis Dreaming, “Nightmares are a cry for resolution for finding a way to incorporate the terrible experience into our lives. Occasional nightmares are normal,” she adds. “But not nightly, and not over and over again.”
 

When nightmares are a sign of danger

nightmares sign of danger
Major depression usually wipes out dreaming altogether,” says Dr Cartwright. “Depressed people usually have no recall of dreaming, no dream content, no story. If they do, it’s very short, very bland, with no feeling at all.
“As they recover from depression, however, their ability to dream comes back, and their dreams get more elaborate and full of emotion.”
Unfortunately, those recovering from depression can sometimes overshoot and be flooded with negative emotion.
That’s when suicides can occur,” cautions Dr Cartwright. So it’s very important that anyone who is depressed report nightmares to their doctor immediately.
 

How to stop having nightmares

Nightmares are a sign of overload. Check with a doctor, psychiatrist, or therapist if you’re depressed, if they recur, or if you discover that your dreams are caused by distressing feelings from the past that have been triggered by current events.
Otherwise, here’s how Rosalind Cartwright, Ph.D., director of the sleep disorder service at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago and suggests you keep them at bay:
  • Recognise that the dream is bad while you're having it. This may sound impossible to do, but it’s not. Simply resolve that you’re going to do this before you fall asleep. It may take a few tries, but you’ll get the hang of it.
  • Identify what in the dream makes you feel bad. What are the feelings or events involved?
  • Change the ending. Turn what’s negative into something positive. You may have to wake up to do it, but eventually, you’ll be able to tell yourself to write a better ending as you sleep.
  • Keep a dream diary. Write down your dreams every morning. All your dreams, not just the nightmares. Then periodically review the ones that trouble you. Try to figure out why they’re upsetting.

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