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| Henry Fuseli's "The Nightmare"--sleep and dreams were common themes in his paintings |
Last night I had a dream so bad and so real, once I woke from it, I made some tea and stayed up for fear it would start again if I went back to sleep. I can never get good dreams back when I return to bed, but with nightmares, it's entirely different...they come back with a vengeance.
I read a lot about dreams because they fascinate me and I want to figure out how to get rid of my bad ones or the ones that make me feel guilty. There are so many theories about why we dream, but one that goes centuries back and some people still believe is that they could be sent from God or the Devil. If that is true, then I'm probably in a lot of trouble.
Neurobiology is also used to explain REM sleep and our night visions. Most of my dreams are too plot-driven or emotionally layered to be the result of science. Yet, Freud's reading of dreams drives me crazy with his Oedipal focus.
One reason dreams can be disturbing is that we believe the events in them are actually happening while we are having them. According to Wikipedia:
The reason for this may be that the prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain responsible for logic and planning, exhibits decreased activity during dreams. This allows the dreamer to more actively interact with the dream without thinking about what might happen, since things that would normally stand out in reality blend in with the dream scenery.[42]
I think guilt and repressed emotion play a huge factor in bad dreams. The more we repress things, the more they can show up when and where we least want them.
Here are some helpful websites I found while going online last night.
http://www.charminghealth.com/applicability/nightmare.htm
http://www.mnn.com/health/fitness-well-being/blogs/nightmares-about-more-than-just-fear-new-study-finds
http://psychology.about.com/od/statesofconsciousness/p/dream-theories.htm
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