In a dream, nothing is impossible for us and we can literally get into the world of our dreams: be a billionaire, meet a star, live in a fabulous place. But even in our nightly dreams, we can rob a bank, deal with enemies or even commit suicide … As it turned out, images and plots of the second type can be symptoms of a certain mental disorder.
We learned the most common dreams by which a mental disorder can be determined. Of course, we are talking about plots that a person sees not once, but with stable constancy.
1. Dreams that you see with schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness. The study confirmed that the longer a person is sick with this disorder, the richer their dreams. Colors become brighter and emotional experience is stronger.
For example:
- Unconnected frightening images.
- Rough and violent content.
- Dreams in which a person sees himself from the outside: a small child, a dead man or in the guise of some kind of animal.
- Objects such as people or cars move backwards.
- Experiencing long-forgotten emotions and feelings.
- Unreal or parallel worlds; hell or heaven.
- The same repetitive plot. Doctors of medical science have revealed the fact of recurring dreams during one night in acute schizophrenia.
- Colored dreams in which it is clearly visible in what color all the details are painted. People with schizophrenia have colored dreams 20 times more often than healthy people.
- Experiencing the absolute reality of what happens in a dream. Having woken up after such a dream, the patients cannot understand for a long time whether it was in a dream or in reality. The phenomenon was first described by FM Dostoevsky in the novel "The Brothers Karamazov": Ivan Karamazov could not understand whether he was really talking with the devil or if he was dreaming about it.
2. Dreaming with bipolar disorder
Promotional video:
Bipolar disorder is a manic-depressive disorder characterized by atypical mood swings. If, as a rule, schizophrenics are laconic in mentioning their dreams, then bipolar people describe their dreams in great detail:
- The experience of indescribable happiness. Such dreams are called manic dreams, since they are most often observed in hypomanic states. These are very vivid and colorful dreams that remain in the memory for a long time. For example, you can be a divine being who is worshiped by everyone and feel power and bliss from what is happening. Neuropsychology explains such dreams as the transition of depression to a manic state.
- Serial dreams, or dreams that can last for several years. Plots in such dreams are a kind of series, where each new "episode" begins from the place where the dream was interrupted for the last time.
3. Dreams of people suffering from depression
Signs of depression are sometimes hard to spot right away. But you are much closer to her than you think if every night you are haunted by terrifying dreams. Namely:
- Some dark place (for example a cemetery) or even your own funeral. During such a dream and after awakening, the patient often feels guilty about such a plot.
- Dead in the guise of the living. It is interesting that if, during sleep, an understanding comes to a person that these people are not alive, then they take the form of the dead.
- Nightmares with a sense of indescribable terror. Upon waking up, a person does not immediately understand that it was just a dream, but at the moment of realization he feels joyful relief: "Thank God, I just dreamed it." Dreams like these are considered the equivalent of panic attacks.
- Parallel dreams are several unrelated dreams, each of which replaces the other during one night.
-
Sleep in a dream - when you dream that you want to sleep, then that you fall asleep and see another dream inside the dream. What happens in the next dream, you perceive as reality, while clearly realizing that you had a dream before. And when you really wake up, it's already difficult for you to understand whether you really woke up or if this is another dream.
By the way, for the first time such dreams were described by N. V. Gogol in his story "Portrait", where every awakening of the hero turned out to be only a part of his nightmare.
- Dreams with the experience of reduplication of self-perception. Let's decipher: for example, while you are being buried, you can watch your funeral from the sidelines. At one point, you immediately feel yourself dead and alive. You can also dream that you are participating in something, and at the same time realize that you are only dreaming about it. Moreover, you can simultaneously dream and analyze it.
4. Details of dreams that can signal mental anesthesia
Mental anesthesia is an incomplete loss of the ability to experience positive and negative emotions. Not only during the waking period, but also during sleep:
- Loss of sense of self, body or emotions. For example, you feel your soul in a dream, but you do not feel your own body. Or you look in the mirror, but you do not see your reflection.
- Dreams in which you die several times during the night.
- The feeling of "unreality" of what is happening in them. That is, you clearly realize that everything around is just a fantasy.
- The absence of any feelings or, conversely, the experience of forgotten emotions that have not been in real life for a long time. You may dream, for example, of a dog attacking you and biting you, but you will not feel fear.
- Dreams with depersonalization: familiar places and close people are perceived as something alien and unfamiliar. For example, you may be dreaming about your own home, but you will feel like you are seeing it for the first time.
- Loss of the sensation of sleep in which you can completely control it and even wake yourself up.
- Perception of what is happening with someone else's eyes, but at the same time without losing the feeling of one's own "I". Max Frye, in The Book of Complaints, describes this phenomenon in terms of people with unusual ability.
5. Dreaming with obsessive-compulsive disorder
The urge to wash your hands 10 times a day or constantly come back home to check if the iron is definitely turned off is obsessive-compulsive syndrome. The obsessive state does not leave patients even in sleep.
Here are its characteristics:
- Fighting in a dream with obsessive contrasting desires. You may dream about how you are struggling with some fear, but you give up. When you wake up, you will feel guilty for dropping your hands.
- Emotionality, intense guilt, shame and anger.
- The realization that you have some kind of magical power and are able to control others.
6. Images for post-traumatic stress
PTSD differs from normal stress in that it occurs as a result of a traumatic situation and, as a rule, causes nightmares:
- People with this syndrome may have recurring dreams with a traumatic situation. So, a person who has suffered a war often dreams of being shot at, and at that moment he runs out of cartridges.
- Repeating from time to time the same and most often meaningless images. Moreover, you can remember them and even know how the dream will end, as well as change its ending.
- Interrupted dreams that always end in the same place.
- Perception of individual parts of dream images. For example, you may dream of a man waist-deep or a mouth that speaks separately in an ominous voice.
- Dreams painted in only one color.
- You run away from someone in fear and, according to the law of meanness, you feel that you are slowing down. Slow motion picture. Usually you do not see who is chasing you, but more often than not you guess who it is.
- Reincarnation as an animal or even a tree. Usually in such dreams there are no words and no thoughts.
- Dreams that you control from start to finish.
- Feeling like a different sex. A woman, for example, may feel like a man with a mustache.
- Identifying yourself with a criminal, even if you only "stole" a chocolate bar. Such dreams are found in 30% of those convicted of illegal actions.
Share your strangest dreams. Have you had any of these dreams?