It was a disturbing dream. And unfortunately, you remember the scariest part.
Really, it was like a bad horror movie. You were running through the forest with an axe murderer chasing you. Just when he got within reach of your right arm, you screamed. And then you woke up.
The dream was so disturbing that you aren’t able to go back to sleep for hours. And you can’t stop wondering just why this creepy scenario was even in your mind at all.
The question is: What do disturbing dreams like this really mean?
For years, people have tried to decipher the meaning of dreams. And of course, the most famous person to delve into dreams was the wacky Sigmund Freud.
According to Simply Psychology, “Freud considered dreams to be the royal road to the unconscious as it is in dreams that the ego's defenses are lowered so that some of the repressed material comes through to awareness, albeit in distorted form. Dreams perform important functions for the unconscious mind and serve as valuable clues to how the unconscious mind operates.”
This general concept of analysis sometimes is applied to theories of why we have scary dreams. This particularly applies to how we deal with inner fear.
“Nightmares tend to suggest that we are needing to deal with something that generates fear in our self,” says psychotherapist Jeffrey Sumber, who studied global dream mythology at Harvard University and Jungian dream interpretation at the Jung Institute in Zurich, in an interview with Psych Central. “They can also be a way to release these fears, depending on how we respond to the dream itself.”
Sumber says that not dealing with nightmares can make the road to moving past them difficult. And for just reason.
“If I have a terrible nightmare, and I try to forget it as soon as I wake up because it was so traumatic, it is likely it will recur because I am not using the dream material to learn and grow. Nightmares are rarely prescriptive, meaning they are not signs that something bad will happen,” Sumber tells Psych Central. “On the other hand, nightmares exist to shake us up so that we spring into action by confronting the root fear, addressing the anxiety…Nightmares are a natural response to fear and anxiety and while they don’t feel very good in the moment, they are releasing pressure for our psyche to operate with less anxiety.”
Sumber says that nightmares are a chance to address fears. He says that this can be done with a few simple, self-directed questions.
“Ask yourself: “’What am I afraid of?’ ‘What does this dream suggest about me right now?’ ‘What can I do to learn more about the root fear that this nightmare reveals?’” he says.
Theories aside, scientific researchers have tried to understand just what causes these dreams. And what they’ve found is nothing short of fascinating.
According to Psychology Today, relatively recent research has investigated disturbed dreaming to understand the triggers behind them and attempted to differentiate between bad dreams and nightmares.
This research, conducted at Université de Montréal in Quebec, involved 572 co-ed volunteers. They were told to keep records of dreams, whether good or bad, for a period between two and five weeks, according to Michael J. Breus, Ph.D., for Psychology Today.
“The reports included details about dreams’ narratives, the emotions present and their level of intensity, as well as the presence of sleep terrors -- brief, highly intense periods of fright during dreams, that are often accompanied by actual screaming or movement like sleepwalking. Researchers considered episodes of sleep terrors to be distinct from nightmares,” according to Breus.
Researchers were able to obtain almost 10,000 dream reports -- of which 431 were identified as bad dreams, and 253 were identified as nightmares.
“Researchers used the result of waking from the dream as the distinguishing characteristic between bad dreams and nightmares; nightmares resulted in awakenings, and bad dreams did not,” Breus says.
Themes were picked in which volunteers could categorize their dreams, including physical aggression, being chased, interpersonal conflicts, accidents, failures and helplessness, evil presences, disasters and calamities, apprehension, worry and health concerns. “They also established emotional categories to further define dream content, including fear, anger, sadness, confusion, disgust, guilt, and frustration. Researchers used scales of both rationality and ‘everydayness’ to evaluate levels of bizarreness in disturbed dreams.”
The findings were more than interesting. For starters, bad dreams were more common than nightmares. Nightmares comprised nearly 3 percent of the 9,796 dreams, and bad dreams accounted for 10.8 percent, according to Breus.
An underlying commonality was found. “The most common themes in both bad dreams and nightmares were physical aggression, interpersonal conflicts and failure or helplessness,” Breus says. “More than 80 percent of nightmares and more than 70 percent of bad dreams contained one or more of these themes, compared to 38.2 percent of non-disturbing dreams.”
Just like in the axe murderer dream we earlier told you about, volunteers often reported fear. “Fear was the most common emotion reported in both nightmares and bad dreams. Among nightmares, 65.1 percent contained fear as the main emotion, as did 45.2 percent of bad dreams,” Breus says.
Psychology Today reports that one finding was quite surprising.
“Researchers compared the presence of negative events and outcomes in everyday dreams to disturbing dreams,” Breus says. “They found nightmares and bad dreams contained more aggressions and misfortunes and contained fewer positive, friendly aspects than everyday dreams. However, bad dreams and nightmares contained less failure than everyday dreams.”
Experts say there is an important aspect to this discovery.
“This suggests…that our disturbing dreams deal less often with issues of competence than more ordinary, less overtly upsetting everyday dreams."
So next time you have a disturbing dream, remember that you’re not alone. While you might not understand it, you’ll have more insight than you did during your last disturbing dream, right?
Look for the underlying themes of your dream and see which research category you fall into. If anything, this will give you a direction in which to analyze future dreams. And don’t forget to ask yourself Sumber’s questions.