Why Do Nightmares Rerun?

Why do we have nightmares and how can we stop them? Part of the problem is that “We take our problems to sleep and we work through them during the night”. By taking care of your nightmares while awake, helps eliminate them from our sleep.

In today’s Globe & Mail newspaper in the “Social Studies” section was this small blurb from the Wall Street Journal. I could not find the article online, so I am copying it from the printed newpaper.

” ‘We take our problems to sleep and we work through them during the night,” says Rosalind Cartwright, an emeritus professor of neuroscience at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, who has spent nearly 50 years studying sleep and dreams. Her new boo, The Twenty-four Hour Mind, explains that the mind latches on to some thread of unfinished emotional business from the day. Then, in REM sleep (the rapid-eye movement period when most dreaming occurs), it calls up bits of older memories that are somehow related, and melds them together. ‘That’s why dreams look so peculiar. You have old memories and old memories Scotch-plaided into each other,” she says. ‘They are emotional connections rather than logical ones.” Usually, people work through the most negative emotions first, and their dreams become more positive as the night goes on … But nightmares interrupt that process; people usually wake up before the frightening emotion is resolves, so the dream keeps repeating.”

So how do I stop a nightmare from reoccurring, is the logical question? The answer is: It is quite simple to stop a nightmare, but not as easily done alone as we need some help confronting the “monster”. Once we understand the meaning of the nightmare and have confronted the “monster” in the waking state, we have taken away its power and the nightmare will not return.

Talking to a dream guide about your nightmare can free you from it. Give it a try today. We offer a free 20 minute phone introductory consultation.