Five surprising facts about ‘Nightmares’

There are various reasons that prove that nightmares might actually be good for someone's mental health.

Following are some reasons why nightmares might actually be good.

1. Nightmares can make you feel better

Various scientific studies into nightmares have revealed an interesting potential upside to them. Bad dreams, it turns out, could provide you with a way of dealing with stress and anxiety.

By playing out your deepest, darkest fears in a safe "virtual simulation," your brain attempts to play them out in a narrative.

This might sound like a terrible thing, but when you wake up and remember the events, this helps you handle the situation better. By cementing the events in your concrete memories, you treat them like the past, not present.

This, scientists believe, allows you to distance yourself from them and provides a form of emotional release.

2. Nightmares can actually benefit your physical wellbeing

Another surprising benefit of nightmares is the fact that they can actually be physically beneficial to you. Nightmares tend to occur during REM sleep when blood flow decreases to the brain and redirects to the muscles and other vital body systems.

This, it turns out, lets organs and other tissues restore and recover from the daily grind. Growth and stress hormones, your immune system, heart, and blood pressure are all positively affected as a consequence.

While this also happens during dreams, it is important to get as much REM sleep as physically possible.

So, although nightmares are not a very pleasant experience at the time, your body really benefits from the increased blood supply. This will improve your overall wellbeing in the long run.

3. Nightmares are a kind of threat training

Nightmares, according to research by neuroscientists, could be your body's way of training you for potential real-life threats. Rather similar to point 1 above, nightmares can also help you "act out" potentially dangerous situations before they occur in the daytime.

Researchers asked 18 volunteers to EEG headsets while they slept. They then woke them several times during the night to ask them a series of questions about their dreams.

By comparing information on dreams that involved fear, they were able to map their brain activity prior to being woken up. They found that during "scary" dreams, two areas of the brain were particularly active.

4. Nightmares could help you understand suppressed emotions

Nightmares, some scientists believe, can also help you understand, and work through some of those pesky suppressed emotions you might be hiding from yourself.

Technically called dissociation, during nightmares in the REM stage of sleep, your brain's suppression systems are relaxed, and the emotions are unlocked.

This provides you with an unparalleled opportunity to reflect on things you might be suppressing.

"Interpreting dreams and nightmares offers a unique opportunity to reflect on the things we may be suppressing, or gain insight from our subconscious. Barrett questions the usefulness of 'dream dictionaries,' but encourages people to reflect on what their dream might mean to them personally. Pay attention to when you have a nightmare and what it’s about.

Use the scary dream to take a journey through your emotional landscape. You might be surprised by what you find." - Inverse.

5. Nightmares are a kind of natural "exposure therapy"

Scientists have also started to believe that nightmares could act as a form of "exposure therapy" for those who've experienced real traumas in their life. For psychiatrists, this is generally considered as the "gold standard" for treating phobias and PTSD-related conditions in patients.

By gradually exposing someone to their deepest fears, say dogs or spiders, in a safe setting, this kind of therapy slowly learns to manage their phobia. Nightmares appear to work in much the same way.

This is especially true for particularly upsetting events and nightmares, it appears, are your natural way of reliving the past and achieving a kind of closure.

But, it should be noted, much like exposing someone to their phobias while their anxiety levels are high tend to trigger their "fight or flight" responses. Inevitably they will want to extricate themselves from the situation ASAP and this simply reinforces their fears.

This can also happen with nightmares if you wake up prior to the "main event."

This article has been taken from Interesting Engineering.