Although we started 2022 with high hopes, this year has become one of the most challenging. Anxiety has begun to rise along with the death toll from COVID-19, an issue that has remained pressing for many over the past few months. Whether you realize it or not, all of this affects the quality of your sleep, including your dreams .
In fact, if you've noticed that you've been having particularly strange dreams since the start of the pandemic, you're not alone. But why does this happen and what can we do about it?
We spoke to several experts to find out what you need to know to get a better night's sleep .
Suppressed desires
Our unconscious is a huge library of images, colors, smells, noises, sensations, emotions. Freud explained dreams as “repressed desires,” Jung spoke of “hereditary memories, archetypes going back to the dawn of time.”
All these "wishes" and "hereditary memories" can come from the depths, like bubbles that rise to the surface to happen in the strangest scenarios.
Strange dreams do not mean that there is something wrong with your mind. Rest assured, in this irrational and subjective world of dreams, even the stupidest stories are normal.
Animals dream too
Of course, not a single dream book deals with the dreams of animals. Scientists have long proven that this is quite real.
What evidence is there that animals dream?
- rats - researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology diagnosed the brains of rats and found that they continued to see in their dreams what was happening to them in reality;
Evidence that animals dream - dogs - if any person carefully watches his pet during sleep, he can find how the dog continues to run, grab something with its mouth, this indicates that the animal sees these pictures in a dream;
- cats - a similar situation with these animals, it has been noticed more than once that cats make certain sounds in their sleep, make movements with their limbs, which clearly indicates that the animals are reproducing their usual actions.
Expression of the unconscious
Our subconscious can take over our consciousness at different times. A moment when we are particularly sensitive, “on the edge” - which can also provoke death dreams - a moment of stress, a moment of strong emotional tension, for example associated with shock, can transport us into this phantasmagoric world of dreams, escaping from a reality that is too complex or oppressed.
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We find refuge there and give free rein to our vivid and whimsical imagination. Sometimes we mistakenly consider these stories to be completely crazy.
There is no general interpretation of dreams, since a dream is something personal, it is an expression of our unconscious.
Why do I have strange dreams?
Strange dreams are often the result of psychological stress or changes in your daily life. Exposure to stress or anxiety right before bed—for example, reading the news, watching a scary movie—can also cause strange, even vivid dreams.
Why do people have strange dreams?
If you are having very strange dreams, you should try to reduce the stress of your daily life, maintain a healthy sleep schedule every night, and use relaxation techniques to calm yourself down.
Unexpected life events, high levels of stress and changes in daily life can affect our dreams - making them more strange, vivid and memorable.
This is what can often cause very strange dreams and, accordingly, will help get rid of bad dreams and thoughts.
Why do I have strange dreams?
Our consciousness goes through different stages of sleep every night. Most of your dreaming is accompanied by rapid eye movements, starting 1.5-2 hours after falling asleep.
Rapid eye movement dreams are often strange, vivid, or bizarre, often involving emotions.
The purpose of dreams is still a mystery to the scientific community, although there is some evidence as to why you might experience particularly strange, vivid dreams:
While the dream is occurring, new information is being processed.
Research shows that dreams play a role in processing information that has occupied you all day, consolidating memories, and sorting new knowledge. In particular, if a person pays increased attention to one topic before going to bed, there is a high probability that it will manifest itself in a dream. When you obsessively follow the news, scroll through social networks about the coronavirus before going to bed, you are likely to have dreams related to the content of what you saw, and, accordingly, the emotions experienced while performing these actions.
Use your emotions while working
There is evidence that dreams are a form of psychotherapy for the mind. We form memories, process experiences, and experience them when we sleep. Being awake or dreaming is thought to be particularly important for processing emotions. For example, higher levels of stress can cause increased sleep onset, which can lead to more vivid dreams. There is also a strong link between post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the prevalence of nightmares.
There are changes in your routine
REM sleep cycles become longer and deeper throughout the night, leading to your deepest sleep before waking up in the morning. If you fall asleep later, you may experience more REM sleep than usual, increasing the likelihood of strange dreams. And the opposite can also be true: little or no sleep can lead to more vivid dreams.
How to get rid of bad dreams and thoughts
From time to time, everyone had very strange dreams, usually not causing concern.
In fact, there are several strategies used to get rid of strange and sometimes bad dreams or calm down after they occur:
Reduce stress
How you spend your time before bed can affect your subsequent dreams. Therefore, try to refrain from activities that make you anxious or misleading, such as watching scary movies or reading bad news. You can also use stress management strategies to improve your sleep: journaling, regular exercise, meditation, talking to a therapist.
Relaxation techniques
If a disturbing dream wakes you in the middle of the night, it may be difficult to fall back to sleep immediately. After restless sleep, relaxation, deep breathing, focusing on lowering your heart rate, and avoiding thinking about a bad dream are helpful.” You can also try to occupy your mind with something else, such as reading a book, until you start to feel sleepy again.
Try sleep rehearsal
A technique known as “dream rehearsal” is another way to help you manage or prevent dreams. This process involves writing a story about a bad dream and then describing an alternative or happier ending that can “set the intention to end the dream in a positive way, right before sleep.”
Stick to a sleep routine
The ability to have good sleep hygiene can help you sleep better, perhaps even avoid strange and often bad dreams. This means that if a person aims to fall asleep and wake up at around the same time every day, it can help regulate their circadian rhythm and avoid excessive sleep, deep sleep or sleep deprivation.
TIP: If you continue to experience disturbing dreams or nightmares that are preventing you from getting a good night's sleep, it is worth discussing your sleep habits and stress levels with your doctor.
Life circumstances
Strange dreams are windows into our inner world. They are closed until an event breaks this calm, the window opens and releases several disparate images that come together in a strange scenario.
These are the circumstances of our daily life that resonate in our unconscious. An event, words, conscious images, an obsession, a situation - our unconscious perceives and prints everything, even if we do not see or hear anything consciously.
Although our sleep spans several cycles, sleep is a world in which everything is possible, there is no limit, even in time.
A dog runs in a dream (video):
Scientists have suggested that the rat brain stores information
, playing it again in a dream, and at the same speed as in reality.
Wilson is convinced that one of the main functions of dreams is to consolidate memories in memory
. This is why we remember better the information we receive immediately before bed.
People with amnesia have the strangest dreams
If dreams help you store memories, what should you do if you have amnesia? It turns out that people who have lost their memory have very bizarre dreams.
.
There are several types of memory, and amnesiacs may not be able to remember certain events, specific facts, or dates
. It is interesting that in a dream some things can come back to them, for example, some skills, but in real life they do not remember these things at all.
During experiments, people suffering from amnesia were told about the game Tetris.
, however, they
did not remember at all what kind of game it was
.
In the middle of the night they were woken up and asked to tell what they saw in their dreams. Three out of five subjects answered that they saw “falling, overturning blocks
.
An ordinary person in a dream, even with the strangest dreams, mainly sees objects familiar to him
. A person with amnesia can see objects that are very strange to him, but he cannot remember where he saw them in reality.
Strange dreams are just a job of sorting through memories
Amnesia research allowed Dr. Robert Stickgold to
put forward
another hypothesis regarding dreams
.
He tried to answer the question of why we see strange dreams. Stickgold revealed that amnesiacs retain an image of an event in their subconscious
, even if they cannot consciously pull it out of the depths of their memory. For some reason, the brain reproduces this image during sleep.
The hidden meaning of strange dreams
Any element, such as an accident, causes an echo in our unconscious and releases images with no apparent meaning. But it is their strangeness that makes them so rich.
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Sometimes we would like to be able to decipher a dream so that we know how it affects our real life. In fact, it is really up to us to decipher the meaning of our dreams through the appearance of these strange images.
We describe them as strange when they frighten or surprise us. However, this is something completely normal, since situations arise that we suppress and the subconscious mind refuses to consider in a normal state of awareness.
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How to get rid of nightmares?
Set up a regime
If you stay up late at work and then sleep until lunchtime, then problems with sleep should not surprise you. Getting up and going to bed at the same time every day is the first step to healthy sleep.
Take care of your sleep hygiene
There are a number of simple rules that should be followed in the bedroom: complete darkness and silence, regular ventilation, no telephone or TV, natural bed linen, comfortable mattress and pillow. Learn to sleep properly!
Photo: istockphoto.com
Avoid stress
Stress causes not only nightmares, but also high blood pressure, decreased immunity, stroke, depression, premature aging and other kinds of troubles. Avoid conflicts at work and at home, play sports, eat tasty and healthy foods, and get plenty of rest.
Develop good habits
First you need to get rid of the harmful ones. Smoking, coffee and alcohol abuse are triggers for your nervous system. Therefore, it is worth excluding them. But taking a walk before bed and taking a warm bath will definitely benefit you and your sleep.
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Seeing the future in a dream
In the 1960s, Maimonides Medical Center
unusual experiments
in New York . One of the experiments was related to the ability to predict the future. Participants were divided into two groups: one group stayed awake and focused on a specific image. The second group was sleeping at that time.
Scientists woke up sleeping participants while they were in the REM stage of sleep and asked them to tell what they saw in their dreams. The strangest thing is that most of the participants in the second group described the images that the first group saw.
Another example is also from the 1960s. Aberfan was damaged by a coal mine collapse after heavy rainfall
, South Wales, UK.
More than a hundred people, most of whom were children, died. Psychiatrist John Barker
went to Aberfan and asked its residents if anyone had dreamed about the event before it happened.
30 residents of the village said that they dreamed of a disaster
. There are millions of such examples, and you probably saw the future in your dreams.
Could this be a disease?
In most cases, the chaotic wandering of images in your head does not pose any threat. The problem can arise if you confuse a dream and a hallucination. This is not such a rare story as it might seem. More than 12% of people experience hypnopompic hallucinations upon awakening.
They differ from dreams in their frightening realism. Waking up from even the most vivid dream, a person realizes that the pictures in his head are a game of the mind and fantasy. In the case of hallucinations, even by opening the eyes, a person can see images - faces or monsters; hear sounds - dialogues or a phone ringing; feel the touch - of someone else's hand or giant insects. The sensation can be neutral, terrifying, or a pleasant experience.
Psychiatrists consider such hallucinations as normal. However, too “real” sensations at the moment of awakening often accompany really serious problems: narcolepsy, anxiety disorders, depression.
Unusual stories are seen more often by lonely people
In 2001, neurologist Patrick McNamara proved that the nature of dreams differs among people of different social status.
His 300 students were divided into several groups according to how they lived. People who spent time alone formed one group. Those who lived with family or a partner – another.
For a certain time, both were interrogated, finding out what they were seeing and what nature of the plots arose. It turned out that more vivid and strange pictures appeared among students living alone. They were more likely to experience nightmares or inexplicable visions with a vivid emotional coloring, which were remembered for a long time and well.
Thus, it was concluded that unusual and incomprehensible things are dreamed of in place of the attachments a person lacks.
. Consciousness compensates for the lack of emotions caused by natural instincts.
What do strange dreams say?
One day I was going to visit my friend in Los Angeles. I boarded the plane, looked out the window, when I suddenly realized that I was sitting in slippers and had no things with me at all. Everyone has probably had similar dreams. In them, for example, you go to the store, take a bottle of milk, and at the checkout you pay for dried fish. Or you are preparing for tomorrow’s math exam, although you have already graduated from school a long time ago and are not a teacher by profession. Dreams can indeed be amazingly strange, and the scientific community still can't say exactly why. A new hypothesis, however, sheds light on some of the mysteries of dreams. As the lead author of the new study, neuroscientist Eric Hoel of Tufts University, writes, dreams introduce some random oddities into our boring existences and give us more ability to cope with the unexpected. Hoel, inspired by his understanding of how neural networks learn, proposed an alternative theory of dreaming: the supersaturated brain hypothesis.
According to a new theory of dreams, strange dreams teach us to expect the unexpected.
Collection of answers to your questions
Dreams are images that appear in the mind of a sleeping person. Their content can be ordinary, these are real people and events, but sometimes we wake up in bewilderment. What you see at night is neither good nor bad, it is simply impossible to understand. Why do I have strange and incomprehensible dreams? Maybe it’s a play of the imagination, or maybe a warning or a hint?
Strange predictive dreams
There are dreams that predict the future. As people say, they are warnings from guardian angels. The dream is remembered, and the brain, identifying the sequence of future events, prepares the person for the turn of events. Believers perceive such messages better and try to protect themselves with prayers. Ordinary people can also interpret it correctly if they pay due attention to it, rethink it and draw the appropriate conclusion.
As they say, saving drowning people is the work of the drowning people themselves. Each person needs to understand his subconscious and the signs it sends. They are individual and so is their interpretation. The same symbol seen in a dream cannot be interpreted in the same way for different people. Each person has his own understanding and perception of events. I would like to advise all people to preserve their natural sleep time if possible, and not to waste this precious time on empty actions that are not more important than your health. This will help maintain health and prolong life.
