QUESTION: Why do we have nightmares?
Nightmares are frightening plots in a dream that cause strong emotions of anxiety, fear, or terror and force a person to wake up abruptly. Such episodes can significantly worsen the quality of life and cause a fear of falling asleep.
One of the most frequent causes of nightmares is a high level of stress, emotional overstrain, and accumulated anxiety during the day. The brain uses the REM sleep phase to process the experiences it has received, which sometimes results in frightening images.
There are other common triggers that provoke unpleasant dreams.
If nightmares recur regularly and begin to interfere with normal life activity, it is recommended to seek help from a somnologist or psychotherapist. To work with this problem, the imagery rehearsal therapy method is actively used, in which the patient in a waking state rewrites the frightening dream scenario with a happy or neutral ending, training the brain to react to stressful images in a new way.