Why do we have really distressing dreams? What purpose does it serve?!

[dreamworlds]

Last night I was tossing and turning anyway due to it being so hot so my sleep was already disturbed because of that.

However my sleep wasn’t helped by the fact I had a really distressing dream. I won’t go into the details but it was horrible.

Even though it’s not real I’ve woken up feeling affected by the emotions. And even more tired than I would have been anyway!

What purpose do such vividly explicit and distressing dreams serve? Does anybody know?!

Oh! You have "dream hangover". I get this after particularly horrible dreams and it affects me the next day.

My counsellor told me that dreams are the mind processing and dealing with unresolved issues from the past, so can strike even in happy times. I was having them every night, it was awful. They got much better in therapy but have come back since lockdown as it's triggered loads of stuff.

Hi @Mascotte thanks for your reply, and yes, dream hangover is a great way of putting it.

I would understand if the dream was related to something that had happened in the past - for example if I were dreaming about an ex who didn't treat me very well. But the dream last night was like something out of a horror movie! I just imagine what my mind 'got' out of trying to process something like that, when it was far more distressing than anything that's happened in my past.

"I just can't imagine what my mind 'got' out of trying to process something like that" that should be!

I had some really horrific dreams when I was on anti depressants (like people being killed and butchered and other terrifying stuff) like you say OP way more distressing than anything that's happened in RL. I've dreamt people (friends) have died before and that made me feel weird for days.

My therapist would say 'What was the feeling?' and then wonder if that was a feeling I was having currently and then explore that..

@Heygirlheyboy

My therapist would say 'What was the feeling?' and then wonder if that was a feeling I was having currently and then explore that..

Oooh that's interesting! I'll give that some thought this afternoon after all my Zoom meetings have finished!

It's supposed to be that you process things in dreams that you either can't process during the day (too traumatic/not enough time/energy/don't realise it's a thing you need to process) or as part of something you are processing, whether you're doing it actively or avoiding it.

I don't believe dreams predict anything but they definitely seem to reflect inner goings on.

I dreamt last night that DS2 was repeatedly run over on a motorway Luckily in the dream he was perfectly fine, not even a bruise! I would guess this is because I worry about him hurting himself or having accidents in general.

Some of my dreams are so fucked up I wonder if I'm right in the head

Dreamworlds it is useful.. The feeling rather than the content is the thing..

My dreams are regularly horrific and have been since I was a child.

I like @Heygirlheyboy's explanation.

Not long after I got out of an abusive relationship a new 'friend' came into my life. The timing was perfect - we saw eye to eye, liked the same things, she was just what I needed at one of the worst times of my life. Six months or so in she was having a stressful time and I was doing what I could to help her but something tipped her over the edge one day and she let me have it with both barrels. I had done nothing wrong, I was just 'there'.

After some time and talking it out we carried on with the friendship but I was always just that little bit wary, not giving quite so much of myself again. Next time she lost it I just walked away and let her get on with it. For the next three nights I woke up screaming but those 'dreams' had seemed so real. They obviously were dreams because there were no rats running up the walls or over my face.

I did a bit of thinking and have come to the conclusion she was very similar to my ex and that's why I reacted so badly. I think if I hadn't had the dreams it would have taken me longer to work it out and it would have been even harder to cool things off with her.

I had my first horrid dream in ages the night before last. It was that my DD was missing it was so horrible I woke myself up crying and had to go and check she was in her bedroom. I don’t know why I dreamt it or if it had any purpose.

I used to have a recurring dream as a child that was really nice and I could still vividly describe it and see it in my head. I think that came from a house we looked at while buying one when I was 7 we looked at one that had two staircases and I was desperate for my mum and dad to buy that one! They didn’t but when they moved 22 years later they did, though the second staircase had been taken out much to my disappointment.

After DD was born I kept dreaming that I hadn’t got a baby it was all a dream and she wasn’t real. That one was easy to see where it came from, we had six miscarriages before we had DD.

I found this a really good take on it: www.humangivens.com/college/why-do-we-dream/

There seems to be a feature of the brain that allows a kind of 'rewind' to unprocessed, especially taboo, thoughts and responses to occur while the brain and body are incapable of actually acting anything out physically (in deep sleep). The dreams may be a way of allowing for some acceptance of this, uncontrolled and not 'real' but also preventing total suppression from the more rational or acceptable parts.

Does anyone else occasionally get confused between dreams and reality? This only happens with relatively boring dreams, you know the flying wasn't real!

@Love51 that happens to me with my more gruesome dreams and it can take me a while to know what's real when I wake up.

Simon Armitage - from his poem A Martian Writes a Postcard Home -

"At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
and read about themselves –
in colour, with their eyelids shut."

Last night, just as I was getting to sleep all I could see was a face in the darkness coming towards me, it would get larger as it got nearer. It would get about half way and then disappear and start again. It did this 3 or 4 times and then the last time it got all the way and sort of went through me, and at the point it smashed into me my ears made the most horrible noise in my head. Like a screechy pop that lasted about a second.

I read once, a theory that when we drop off to sleep a surge of hormones are released into the body which affect our emotions.
Our brain wants us to stay asleep (for recharging purposes) so invents scenarios to make sense of those emotions.

I love this theory.

This thread is so refreshing to read, dh looks at me like I’m mad when I say I’m exhausted from my dreams!

I also have the not knowing my dreams from reality - I actually mentioned something to a very senior colleague, he asked me how I knew, as that information wasn’t yet available, I mumbled something about maybe misremembering, but suddenly clicked that I’d dreamt it

I have had a recurring, very vivid dream at times of stress for nearly 20 years, it used to really bother me, but now it’s quite a useful tool for knowing that I need to take some time for myself.

I've just reduced my dose of antidepressant and always have horrific dreams during this phase.

Last night I dreamt I took the abortion pill but later found out I was still pregnant and had a late-term abortion, I won't go into the details but it was traumatic.

I think my brain grasped that subject because I had read a story yesterday about a fetus/ baby who actually survived a late-stage abortion and tracked down her bio mum years later.

The mind is strange!

I think things like Ads make a huge difference. At one point I was on huge quantities of sertraline and had bonkers vivid dreams. I have to say that the scariest one I had was an affair with HMQ. I’m straight and a fervent anti monarchist so that was weird

I have terrible dreams when I am ill-sort of fever dreams and I am fairly sure I have dream the same dream again and again over the years-not sure if I really am or not, but I wake up from a very disturbed sleep having had a dream that I ‘know’ I’ve had before repeatedly. There’s a real feeling of dread-it’s horrible.

I couldn’t tell you now what the dream was though, so maybe I don’t really have it repeatedly and it’s just the feeling of dread that I’m remembering?!

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Dreams are more negative than real life: Implications for the function of dreaming

Abstract
Dream content studies have revealed that dream experiences are negatively biased; negative dream contents are more frequent than corresponding positive dream contents. It is unclear, however, whether the bias is real or due to biased sampling, i.e., selective memory for intense negative emotions. The threat simulation theory (TST) claims that the negativity bias is real and reflects the evolved biological function of dreaming. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis of the TST that threatening events are overrepresented in dreams, i.e., more frequent and more severe in dreams than in real life. To control for biased sampling, we used as a baseline the corresponding negative events in real life rather than the corresponding positive events in dreams. We collected dream reports (N=419) and daily event logs (N=490) from 39 university students during a two-week period, and interviewed them about real threat experiences retrievable from autobiographical memory (N=714). Threat experiences proved to be much more frequent and severe in dreams than in real life, and Current Dream Threats more closely resembled Past than Current Real Threats. We conclude that the TST's predictions hold, and that the negativity bias is real.

I think it's known that more of our dreams are negative than positive. I thought it was an evolutionary way of dealing with possible threats in theory even though you may not be facing them in reality. I've had some horrible dreams lately, hope we all have better dreams tonight!

More dreams are negative than positive? Not in my experience. Most of my dreams are quite mundane.

Our minds definitely make things up in order to make sense of what we experience and it happens in retrospect, which is hard to think about but I think it's true. I struggle with mornings and would often fall back asleep listening to my radio alarm clock, so I'd be dreaming with the soundtrack of the radio presenters, music, etc. Whenever something surprising happened on the radio, I'd always somehow have "already" been dreaming up to that scenario, so for example once there was this game show where the presenter had to find somebody else in a town, and there was no warning that he was about to find the person, but in my dream, the person walked up to the presenter, tapped him on the shoulder and said "Hello!"

That doesn't make sense unless actually my brain was hearing the sounds and processing them into some kind of scenario that made sense in retrospect.

It's pretty mind blowing. The brain is an incredible thing.

Also things like if I heard a banging door IRL it would "come through" to my dream and there would be a whole set up for example a person is carrying something and when I heard the bang it was "because" the person dropped what they were holding.