Fears can usually influence human behaviour provoking disturbances that can be divided as follows:
• General state of anxiety
• Specific phobias
• Nightmares
Talking about nightmares, they are characterized by feelings such as
sense of fault, anguish, loneliness or depression; indeed, during nightmares,
we tend to wake up as if we would get out of that scary dimension.
Etymologically the term comes from the latin incubus, a male demon who
visited women in their sleep to lie with them.
In the Medieval European folklore, the woman who
fell victim to an incubus got pregnant of a half human/
half magical child. Legend has it that the wizard
Merlin was the result of the union of an incubus and a nun.
We can distinguish 3 kinds of bad dreams:
• REM nightmares(in the early phase of the sleep)
• NOT REM nightmares(in the deep phase of the sleep)
• POST-TRAUMATIC nightmares(when you are half-asleep)
REM and NOT REM nightmares have the same origin, but different ways of
appearing. What’s the difference between these 3 categories?
It depends on the emotional involvement of the sleeping subject: in the
first case (REM) you have a quite normal dream in which you realize you’re
asleep. In the second one (NOT REM) you have more an hallucination than
a normal dream and you are not aware that you are living out of the reality.
In the last one (POST TRAUMATIC) you live over and over again a dramatic
situation that you actually experienced, for example a rape, a car accident,
a robbery and so on…
Obviously all these 3 species of nightmare are made up with uncomfortable
or terrible sensations.
The question is: why do we have nightmares?
Doctors agree with each other saying that the most significant source
of these disturbances of the sleep is a psychological problem.
Daily stress, unconscious fears, not-removed bad experiences are often
the origin of our nightmares in which these worries find a way to come
to the surface. But latest studies pointed out that there are even many
other organic causes such as: drugs or alcohol because they ruin neuronal
cells, smoke, periods after a chirurgic operation, to wake up many times
while sleeping, fever, indigestions, epilepsy and much more.
It has been demonstrated that even some respiratory diseases like asthma,
snoring or night-apnoea are responsible for nightmares since they produce
a big intake of carbon dioxide that poisons our brain and make easier
to have a bad dream.
Other researches lately made by the professor Christer Hubkin (University
of Helsinki) show that there are people with a biologic disposition to
have nightmares.
Studying closely the behaviour of 2276 couples of twins, doctor Hubkin
noticed that we can have 3 kinds of temperaments and as many personalities
with the attitude to have bad dreams.
• "A" nature (very aggressive personality )
• Tender nature (sensitive and emotional persons )
• Schizoide nature (people moving from quiet to frenetic behaviour
)
Among these, subjects endowed with "A" nature are disposed
to nightmares more than the others.
If a person frequently suffers from this problem becomes anxious, vulnerable,
touchy. You easily will be afraid of falling asleep with the consequence
that you will spend sleepless nights.
Further consequences of this are to find difficult to concentrate on something,
the lack of lucidity and inability to memorize. In some serious cases
a man can have neurotic behaviours too.
Nightmares are quite common for babies. More appropriate treatment is
to reassure them and to be affectionate with them. This problem disappears
by itself in the adolescence.
Women are another category at risk. From childhood they are more afflicted
with bad dreams than men. Women over fourteen have more nightmares then
the others. Older ones are very vulnerable too.
It needs a psychological action in case of nightmares, while the pharmaceutical
approach must be used in the serious cases with caution. Psychological
treatments more used are:
• INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS: It's used successfully to know and face
those problems that are shown symbolically in nightmares. But it doesn't
produce any improvements if you suffer from too frequent nightmares.
• THE IMAGINARY REPETITION: It’s a treatment that has the
purpose to imagine a new happy ending of the same dream.
• THE LUCID DREAM: It’s the consciousness of having a dream
and the ability to choose it during early moments of the sleep.
• THE HYPNOSIS: It's a state of transfer during which the doctor
follows the patient into the sleep and analyses his nightmare.
It's important to remember that you aren't impotent in front of nightmares.
What are the signals that anticipate a "nightmare night"?
• Before sleeping you can fall in a state of unusual torpor.
• Nightmares sometimes are produced by strong experiences that maybe
you have gone trough. In this case you should wake up and have some camomile,
or tea or just relax yourself.
How can we understand when a dream is turning into a nightmare? Here they
are some tips. The scene of the dream becomes gloomy and contents more
frightening and you feel the need to wake up .A way to escape from a bad
dream should be to connect an object of the dream with a real object,
establishing an ideal ring with reality; after waking up you shouldn't
fall asleep again, trying to have a good night but, rather, you should
be calm and distract yourself.
In other words, the only weapon that we have to fight best our nightmares
is to defeat our daily worries and our unconscious fears in order to feel
safer in the morning and at night as well.
Claudia Costa
Elisabetta Rotondi
Angela Passariello