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Monday, October 19, 2026

Genetic Factors Linked To Nightmares and Poor Mental Health Show Substantial Overlap

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Agenotyping study involving tens of thousands of individuals in Finland identified a significant overlap between genetic factors linked to nightmares and those associated with anxiety, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and neuroticism. The study also found that individuals with insomnia were more likely to experience frequent nightmares. The research was published in Translational Psychiatry.Nightmares are vivid and unsettling dreams that typically result in feelings of fear, distress, or anxiety upon awakening…..….Story continues…

By: Vladimir Hedrih

Source: psypost

Critics:

Scientific research shows that nightmares may have many causes. In a study focusing on children, researchers were able to conclude that nightmares directly correlate with the stress in children’s lives. Children who experienced the death of a family member or a close friend or know someone with a chronic illness have more frequent nightmares than those who are only faced with stress from school or stress from social aspects of daily life.

A study researching the causes of nightmares focuses on patients who have sleep apnea. The study was conducted to determine whether or not nightmares may be caused by sleep apnea, or being unable to breathe. In the nineteenth century, authors believed that nightmares were caused by not having enough oxygen, therefore it was believed that those with sleep apnea had more frequent nightmares than those without it.

The results actually showed that healthy people have more nightmares than sleep apnea patients. Another study supports the hypothesis. In this study, 48 patients (aged 20–85 yrs) with obstructive airways disease (OAD), including 21 with and 27 without asthma, were compared with 149 sex- and age-matched controls without respiratory disease. OAD subjects with asthma reported approximately 3 times as many nightmares as controls or OAD subjects without asthma.

The evolutionary purpose of nightmares then could be a mechanism to awaken a person who is in danger. Lucid-dreaming advocate Stephen LaBerge has outlined a possible reason for how dreams are formulated and why nightmares occur. To LaBerge, a dream starts with an individual thought or scene, such as walking down a dimly lit street.

Since dreams are not predetermined, the brain responds to the situation by either thinking a good thought or a bad thought, and the dream framework follows from there. If bad thoughts in a dream are more prominent than good thoughts, the dream may proceed to be a nightmare. There is a view, possibly featured in the story A Christmas Carol, that eating cheese before sleep can cause nightmares, but there is little scientific evidence for this.

A single, biased study conducted by the British Cheese Board in 2005 argued that consuming cheese could trigger more vivid dreams, but this study was not backed up with sufficient research, and contradicts existing studies which found that consuming dairy products is associated with better overall sleep quality. Severe nightmares are also likely to occur when a person has a fever; these nightmares are often referred to as fever dreams.

Recent research has shown that frequent nightmares may precede the development of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease and dementia. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung seemed to have shared a belief that people frequently distressed by nightmares could be re-experiencing some stressful event from the past. Both perspectives on dreams suggest that therapy can provide relief from the dilemma of the nightmarish experience.

Those with nightmares experience abnormal sleep architecture. The impact of having a nightmare during the night has been found to be very similar to that of insomnia. This is thought to be caused by frequent nocturnal awakenings and fear of falling asleep. When awoken from REM sleep by a nightmare, the dreamer can usually recall the nightmare in detail. They may also awaken in a heightened state of distress, with an elevated heart rate or increased perspiration.

Nightmare disorder symptoms include repeated awakenings from the major sleep period or naps with detailed recall of extended and extremely frightening dreams, usually involving threats to survival, security, or self-esteem. The awakenings generally occur during the second half of the sleep period.

According to the International Classification of Sleep Disorders-Third Edition (ICSD-3), the nightmare disorder, together with REM sleep behaviour disorder (RBD) and recurrent isolated sleep paralysis, form the REM-related parasomnias subcategory of the Parasomnias cluster. Nightmares may be idiopathic without any signs of psychopathology or associated with disorders like stress, anxiety, substance abuse, psychiatric illness or PTSD (>80% of PTSD patients report nightmares).

As regarding the dream content of the dreams they are usually imprinting negative emotions like sadness, fear or rage.^[4] According to the clinical studies the content can include being chased, injury or death of others, falling, natural disasters or accidents. Typical dreams or recurrent dreams may also have some of these topics.

Halliday (1987) grouped treatment techniques into four classes. Direct nightmare interventions that combine compatible techniques from one or more of these classes may enhance overall treatment effectiveness:

Analytic and cathartic techniques
Storyline alteration procedures
Face-and-conquer approaches
Desensitization and related behavioral techniques

Recurring post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) nightmares in which traumas are re-experienced respond well to a technique called imagery rehearsal. This involves dreamers coming up with alternative, mastery outcomes to the nightmares, mentally rehearsing those outcomes while awake and then reminding themselves at bedtime that they wish these alternative outcomes should the nightmares recur.

Research has found that this technique not only reduces the occurrence of nightmares and insomnia but also improves other daytime PTSD symptoms.The most common variations of imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT) “relate to the number of sessions, duration of treatment, and the degree to which exposure therapy is included in the protocol”.

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Dreaming ,Psychology ,DreamInterpretation ,LucidDreaming ,DreamAnalysis ,SubconsciousMind ,MentalHealth ,SleepScience ,CognitivePsychology ,DreamState ,Mindfulness ,UnconsciousMind ,Nightmare ,ExploreYourMind ,SelfDiscovery ,EmotionalWellbeing ,InnerThoughts ,Psyche ,DreamTheory

Monday, February 2, 2026

Neuroscientists Reveal the Real Power of Lucid Dreaming

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When you dream, you drift off to a shadow realm where nothing is real, and what goes on in a dream, stays in a dream or does it? Practical dreaming might seem impossible. But, the dream state can be powerful, and there are ways to channel its elusive influence. Ever since high school, bizarre and uncommon dream states such as lucid dreaming have fascinated neuroscientist Emma Peters, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bern in Switzerland…….Continue reading….

By: Elizabeth Rayne

Source: Popular Mechanics

Critics:

A dream is a succession of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that usually occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Humans spend about two hours dreaming per night, and each dream lasts around 5 –20 minutes, although the dreamer may perceive the dream as being much longer. The content and function of dreams have been topics of scientific, philosophical and religious interest throughout recorded history.

Dream interpretation, practiced by the Babylonians in the third millennium BCE and even earlier by the ancient Sumerians, figures prominently in religious texts in several traditions, and has played a lead role in psychotherapy. The scientific study of dreams is called oneirology. Most modern dream study focuses on the neurophysiology of dreams and on proposing and testing hypotheses regarding dream function.

It is not known where in the brain dreams originate, if there is a single origin for dreams or if multiple regions of the brain are involved, or what the purpose of dreaming is for the body or mind. The human dream experience and what to make of it has undergone sizable shifts over the course of history. Long ago, according to writings from Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, dreams dictated post-dream behaviors to an extent that was sharply reduced in later millennia.

These ancient writings about dreams highlight visitation dreams, where a dream figure, usually a deity or a prominent forebear, commands the dreamer to take specific actions, and which may predict future events. Framing the dream experience varies across cultures as well as through time. Dreaming and sleep are intertwined. Dreams occur mainly in the rapid-eye movement (REM) stage of sleep—when brain activity is high and resembles that of being awake.

Because REM sleep is detectable in many species, and because research suggests that all mammals experience REM, linking dreams to REM sleep has led to conjectures that animals dream. However, humans dream during non-REM sleep, also, and not all REM awakenings elicit dream reports.To be studied, a dream must first be reduced to a verbal report, which is an account of the subject’s memory of the dream, not the subject’s dream experience itself.

So, dreaming by non-humans is currently unprovable, as is dreaming by human fetuses and pre-verbal infants. Dream study is popular with scientists exploring the mind–brain problem. Some “propose to reduce aspects of dream phenomenology to neurobiology.” But current science cannot specify dream physiology in detail. Protocols in most nations restrict human brain research to non-invasive procedures.

In the United States, invasive brain procedures with a human subject are allowed only when these are deemed necessary in surgical treatment to address medical needs of the same human subject. Non-invasive measures of brain activity like electroencephalogram (EEG) voltage averaging or cerebral blood flow cannot identify small but influential neuronal populations. Also, fMRI signals are too slow to explain how brains compute in real time.

Scientists researching some brain functions can work around current restrictions by examining animal subjects. As stated by the Society for Neuroscience, “Because no adequate alternatives exist, much of this research must [sic] be done on animal subjects.” However, since animal dreaming can be only inferred, not confirmed, animal studies yield no hard facts to illuminate the neurophysiology of dreams.

Examining human subjects with brain lesions can provide clues, but the lesion method cannot discriminate between the effects of destruction and disconnection and cannot target specific neuronal groups in heterogeneous regions like the brain stem. Lucid dreaming is the conscious perception of one’s state while dreaming. In this state the dreamer may often have some degree of control over their own actions within the dream or even the characters and the environment of the dream.

Dream control has been reported to improve with practiced deliberate lucid dreaming, but the ability to control aspects of the dream is not necessary for a dream to qualify as “lucid”—a lucid dream is any dream during which the dreamer knows they are dreaming. The occurrence of lucid dreaming has been scientifically verified.“Oneironaut” is a term sometimes used for those who lucidly dream. In 1975, psychologist Keith Hearne successfully recorded a communication from a dreamer experiencing a lucid dream.

On April 12, 1975, after agreeing to move his eyes left and right upon becoming lucid, the subject and Hearne’s co-author on the resulting article, Alan Worsley, successfully carried out this task. Years later, psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge conducted similar work including:

Using eye signals to map the subjective sense of time in dreams.
Comparing the electrical activity of the brain while singing awake and while dreaming.
Studies comparing in-dream sex, arousal, and orgasm.

Communication between two dreamers has also been documented. The processes involved included EEG monitoring, ocular signaling, incorporation of reality in the form of red light stimuli and a coordinating website. The website tracked when both dreamers were dreaming and sent the stimulus to one of the dreamers where it was incorporated into the dream.

This dreamer, upon becoming lucid, signaled with eye movements; this was detected by the website whereupon the stimulus was sent to the second dreamer, invoking incorporation into that dreamer’s dream….

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