Excuse me if you will, for coming to the conclusion, that if you are reading this, then either you dream, or you are frustrated or curious because you do not. This blog is for both groups, though I myself fall into the first category. I have found myself in the last two years learning and understanding a lot more about my dreaming patterns, and times/situations where I might experience nightmares. I am not here to discuss the complexities of the rhinal cortex and hippocampus, though there is much to be learned from the understanding of those; my purpose here is to explore a less scientific, perhaps more philosophical area, that of how dreaming affects us. Psychologists upon psychologists have and are still continuing to study patterns of the brain in dreaming, with particular focus on victims of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the activity levels in the various lobes of the brain. But that is not my purpose here, I presume neither to possess the intellect to tackle such a nightmare, nor to assume that I am worth listening to in the discussion of such a broad topic, but having been on the receiving end of both dreams and nightmares, I can assume the position of knowing what it feels like, of knowing how I am effected, and how I learnt to distinguish between what is concerning and what is mental porridge, so to speak.
My desire is to produce a three part series on dreaming, the first part examining nightmares; the second, dreams (those REM sleep ilustrations behind our eyes that don't frighten), and finally, why some of us dream and others do not.
The reason for selecting nightmares as the first part, is that I have been a "sufferer" of nightmares (sufferer in relative terms) of nightmares for as long as I can remember, and generally the dreaming that I remember most over the years has been the nightmares.
Hartmann (1984) defined a nightmare as a long, frightening dream that awakens the sleeper, and awakening from a frightening dream has been used as an operational definition of nightmares by others (as found in the article 'Nightmares and Bad Dreams: Their Prevalence and Relationship to Well-Being' by Donderi and Zadra). Interestingly enough, when I read this for the first time, I felt pretty perturbed at the fact that 'awakens' was part of the definition, as it is rare for me that I wake up, unless my nightmare is at about 9am in the morning when I'm more prone to waking up anyway. The thought of psychologists was that the intensity of a bad dream must equate to waking you up to be deemed a "nightmare", but it was found that when the waking criterion is used to distinguish nightmares from bad dreams among participants who experience both bad dreams and nightmares, approximately 45% of bad dreams are found to have emotional intensities equal to or exceeding those of the average nightmare. I have not ever taken part in a psychological study, but I reckon that I would be included in that 45%.
I suppose it would be so easy for me to say anything like that though and not be believed, as dreaming is such a personal thing, something only the dreamer can experience and understand (sometimes not even the latter). But I want to share a couple of my nightmares of the past that have physically effected me, though not necessarily woken me up, in order to illustrate how disturbing to sleep and life it can be. To me, there is a scale of terror, that nightmares produce, not distinguishable upon waking up or remaining fast asleep, but from one to five in terms of reality disturbance. 1 being low reality disturbance, 5 being high disturbance. Examples would be 1-dreaming that you'd found something (that in real life was still lost), 2- dreaming that you were having a conversation with a friend, in the same room, 3- dreaming that you'd broken up with a long term partner or fallen out with a best friend, 4- dreaming that someone close to you had died or tried to hurt you, 5- dreams about physical injury that affect you in reality. I could be tighter with examples it has to be said, but these are some of the examples of dreams I have had and so it easier to explain this way.
Notice that the higher they are rated, the more emotionally concerned they are. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to come to the conclusion that strong emotion towards something in reality can affect dreams exponentially; however, I have found nightmares (for me at least)all fall within the higher range. 4 and 5 have been the worst for me. Why is that? Mostly because for me, there has been a serious correlation between fear and the comparison or relation to reality that the dream portrays.
Dream 1. When I was 7 years old, I lived in Uganda, in a lovely massive 3 bedroom detached part bungalow, with a garage under the house. The garden was huge and with 2 dogs I used to play with them outside regularly. I had a dream one night that I walked out of my bedroom (which was my bedroom at the time), and screamed so loud that nothing came out of my mouth. I knew that a man was hunting the house and grounds outside to find me, to kill me. I had no idea who he was, or why, but I just knew that he was. I was panicking, trying to think of where I could go, and the next thing, I was running with all the strength in my legs to (what my dream had composed as a combination between the offices in different countries) the office looking desperately around for my parents. People I knew from the ugandan office were there, and they told me that my dad was in a meeting, but mum saw me and ran to me. She said she'd come back to the house with me and stay with me until I was asleep. She sat on my bed, and I was beginning to feel better, but as I looked up at my window, two glowing green eyes appeared at the corner of my window.
The scariest part of the whole thing was that I still lived in that house, still woke up in that room, and for weeks I couldn't look at the bottom right hand corner of my window because I was terrified. It was how close the dream fit into my then-present reality that made it so terrifying. I don't remember having a strange emotional state at the time, only remember the nightmare and the fear. I did wake up from the one, shaking and crying a little.
Dream 2. This was much worse. And I can trace this one to where it may have sprung from. Only last year, the week following the funeral of my grandad, "Bikey". It was a whole week of these terrors when I slept. But I will discuss the one that disturbed me most here. (For the faint of heart, stop reading now, it's pretty horrid). It was short, succinct, and terrifying. The long and short of it was that I was talking to someone, they told me I was dying, and as I looked down at my chest, the left side of my chest was hemorrhaging. I was dying from internal bleeding, and I was watching it kill me. I woke up almost immediately hands holding where the bleeding had been, and crying. After that I was terrified of going back to sleep.
I wanted to embrace insomnia, I felt safer holding my eyes open than to fall in the horror behind my eyes. The most interesting thing is that I never experience these horrors after a scary film or programme, or a violent news programme. It is almost always emotional. I carry the baggage into my sleep and my mind has just got too much to handle because I didn't get rid of it before bed. From a young age I would pray "God, help me to sleep without any bad dreams or nightmares". Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't, but those times that it didn't now have made me appreciate the importance of unloading whilst I'm awake. The things going through my head, my worries, my concerns, my stress; I just put my ipod in, let the worship in me take over, and by the time I'm ready to sleep, God is so close and has taken it off me completely. Different methods work for different people, I also run to unload.
For those of you who dream, don't underestimate the importance of that unloading, it will make your sleep that much more peaceful and God filled. Chances are, most of the time our nightmares are our own doing as we carry this stuff God waits for all day for us to give Him. Give it up. It's His to deal with, and don't forget that God made the world from rest. Rest is the default position, NOT the other way around.
God intended us to work from rest, so appreciating that rest in its fullness is crucial. I remember a wise friend of mine told me that it is not the enemy that creates these dreams but our own emotions, the enemy just jumps on the back of it because you're vulnerable when you sleep. I don't understand why we have nightmares, and why some people have them and others doing, but this is my two cents.
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