Nightmares: what are they and why do they appear (causes)?

These unpleasant and stressful experiences have always given a sense of mystery.

We spend a good part of our lives sleeping, which is not surprising considering the large amount of energy we must replenish to face the day to day. However, there are times when the sleep stage, which we usually associate with calm and well-being, turns into a hell from which we desperately try to escape.

And the fact is that what we know as nightmares have come to exert such a strong impact on humanity that they have long since ceased to be a simple unpleasant experience that we experience individually and have become a source of all kinds of mythologies or, directly, the definition of what we want to flee from. In fact, we use the word "nightmare" to refer to any highly unpleasant or traumatic experience, equating the real thing to what only happened in our head.

Now then... what are nightmares and what causes them? Let's see it.

• Related article, "What are dreams for?"

What are nightmares?

The nightmares are a state of anxiety and agitation that appears at the moment of dreamingoften associated with images and sensations that cause fear, sadness or any other negative emotion, in such an intense way that it generates the interruption of the dream.

Thus, it is considered that a bad dream does not become a nightmare if it does not causes us to wake up or to reach a state of consciousness between sleep and wakefulness..

This sudden break with sleep is easily produced, since the REM phase, which is the one that occurs during sleep and dreaming (i.e., when sleeping we are both in a state of consciousness directed inward, not outward), it is the stage of sleep that most resembles wakefulness in terms of the activation patterns of neurons at that time. A little "push" can bring us back to the real world.

Why does a nightmare appear?

Like everything else surrounding the study of dreams, there is little that is known for sure about the causes of nightmares. But there are several things on which there is consensus.

The first thing to know is that there is very unlikely to be a single cause that explains the existence of nightmares. This, which is applicable to practically any psychological process, in the case of nightmares is reflected in the effect that several elements have on the frequency of occurrence of these unpleasant experiences. For example, a hectic and stressful lifestyle causes them to appear more frequently, and alcohol addiction has a similar effect, making what we dream about tend to be more unpleasant and anxious.and alcohol addiction has a similar effect, making what we dream tend to be more unpleasant and anxiogenic.

On the other hand, there is one other thing for sure about nightmares: Sigmund Freud was wrong about their origin.. For the father of psychoanalysis, the nightmare is what happens when a part of the unconscious emerges into the dream state without us being able to repress its contents, that which we have been forced to keep sealed those ideas, memories or beliefs. The state of anxiety produced by the fact that we begin to see what we want to continue ignoring makes us feel impelled to wake up in order to make this type of revelations stop.

Why do we know that this does not happen? Among other things, because the theories on which Sigmund Freud based himself to provide this explanation to the phenomenon are not valid, since they are based on speculations on case studies. There are no parts of our mind that try to hide certain contents and prevent them from emerging to consciousness, there are simply contents that at a given moment are not relevant enough to make our attention reach them.

Are they useful?

Considering that Freudian ideas about nightmares are not useful to understand the nature of this kind of experiences? What are nightmares useful for? Some theories suggest that nightmares have no utility, and are a consequence of evolution that has not been promoted by natural selection as an advantageous trait; they are simply there, and are harmless enough so that the genes that make them possible do not disappear with the passing of generations.

Other theories, on the other hand, do attribute a utility to nightmares. Specifically, they point out that their presence in our daily life can make us prepare ourselves for stressful events, maintaining a certain state of anxietyTheories also suggest that nightmares are useful in the short term to overcome specific obstacles, and that they appear when there is something in our forecasts that worries us. In this way, the nightmare would be a kind of mental training to enter into a state of alertness more easily and, consequently, to react quickly.

However, in some cases the possible usefulness of nightmares would not compensate for the damage they produce, so we enter into a vicious circle of stress and anxiety that has a negative impact on our health. a vicious circle of stress and anxiety that has negative repercussions on our health.. In any case, most people are not significantly affected by the appearance of nightmares, since they do not usually occur very often and, although in many cases what is seen in them is very disturbing, it is not experienced with the same harshness with which it would be experienced if it were real.