In 1991, a comparative study was conducted that showed that in reality people more often than in sleep experience positive emotions, and a feeling of fear arises in dreams many times more often than during wakefulness. In general, two-thirds of the emotions that arise in dreams are negative. The data on which negative emotions prevail varies in different studies, but one thing is certain: they do not leave the “negative spectrum”.
For example, a 1966 survey of thousands of college students found that 80 percent of the emotions they experienced in dreams were negative, with half described as fear, danger, tension, and the other half as sadness, anger, or unpleasant embarrassment, confusion.
An analysis of more than 1,400 dream reports conducted by Tufts University has shown that fear is the most prevalent in dreams, followed by helplessness, anxiety and guilt.
[…] Some psychologists have suggested that a properly functioning dreaming model may in fact be even more effective in treating depression than forms of psychotherapy in which patients are encouraged to self-analyze and become more intrusive in recalling.
“Freud considered the subconscious to be something like a cesspool: incompletely expressed emotions are contained in it in a suppressed state, and the task of the therapist is to release these toxic emotions and thereby free the person,” says Joe Griffin, who has been studying the REM phase for more than ten years. REM sleep) and the evolution of dreams. “But research has shown quite unequivocally that dreams do this every night. In other words, nature invented the emotional cistern long before Freud."
But if REM dreams are an autonomous means of regulating moods, what happens to the brain when we have nightmares? Nightmares - especially recurring ones, typical of those who have survived the horrors of war, rape, car accidents and other injuries - are a viewing window through which we can peep how all dreams generally function, how they create connections in our memory system and generate visual images that reflect our prevailing emotions at the moment. So says Ernest Hartmann, professor of psychiatry at Taft University and director of the Sleep Disorders Center at Newton Wellesley Hospital in Boston. Hartmann's father was a colleague of Sigmund Freud. As for the son, his own theory as to how and why we dream,based on the study of the dreams of those who have experienced various kinds of trauma, contradicts Freud's main thesis that every dream is the fulfillment of a secret desire. At the same time, Freud's idea that dreams are a "royal road" to the unconscious coincides with the discoveries of Hartmann.
“Many of us who lead quite ordinary lives have many emotions at any given moment, and it is not easy to determine which of them prevails, which is why our dreams can seem so confusing and even chaotic,” says Hartmann. However, in a recent trauma survivor, the emotions that the brain must process are both strong and understandable, so it's easier to trace how the brain translates these emotions into moving pictures - visual metaphors for the experience. For example, a woman who had been violently raped described her dreams as follows for several weeks:
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“I am walking down the street with a friend and her four-year-old daughter. The girl is attacked by a gang of adult men dressed in black leather. The girlfriend runs away. I try to free the girl, but I realize that my clothes have been ripped off. I wake up in horror."
“I try to go to the bathroom, but the curtains are choking me. I gasp for breath, gasping for air. I think I’m screaming, but in fact I didn’t make a sound.”
“I'm making a film with Rex Harrison. And suddenly I hear the sound of an approaching train, the sound is louder and louder, now the train is already next to us, and I wake up in horror."
“The dream is colored. I'm on the beach. A tornado rises, it covers me. I'm wearing a drawstring skirt. The tornado is twisting me. The strings turn into snakes, which choke me, and I wake up in fear."
And although this woman's dreams contain some details of a terrible reality (an eighteen-year-old rapist entered her room through the window and tried to strangle her with curtains), the main theme of her dreams is the fear and helplessness that she experienced: a child who is being attacked, a feeling of suffocation, a train rushing towards her, a tornado that captured her.
Essentially, Hartmann argues, the task of dreams is to visibly link emotions to a particular setting, and tornadoes or tidal waves are often a metaphor for an overwhelming feeling of fear. He says that some of the survivors of the fire first see him in a dream, but then this image is replaced by tidal waves or the pursuit of bandits.
As Hartmann has established, as the traumatic experience becomes less acute - largely due to the emotional processing that occurs in sleep - dreams still remain vivid and expressive.
At first, the incident is played very vividly and dramatically, but often with one main difference: something happens in the dream that did not actually happen.
Then, and soon enough, the dreams begin to associate this material with other information in the autobiographical memory that is somehow related to what happened. Often times, the trauma survivor dreams of other traumas that may relate to the same feelings of helplessness and guilt. If a person has experienced an incident in which others have been killed or seriously injured, the theme of guilt is almost always present. For example, one who escaped the fire in which his brother died, says: "In my dreams, my brother often injures me or I get injured in an accident or in some other way, but my brother remains unharmed."
For most, nightmares turn into modified versions of what happened, but this happens gradually, as the primary experience is linked through neural networks in the cortex with emotionally related material gleaned from real life or imagination. After a few weeks or months, trauma appears less and less in dreams, and gradually the content returns to normal, as the anxious experience is integrated into the memories of other, positive experiences, and the negative emotions associated with it lose their power.
Hartmann compares this dream model to a kind of autopsychotherapy.
At first, the emotional message constantly echoing in the brain could be expressed by the words “This is the worst thing that can happen! How can you survive this? Hartmann says that the brain tries to answer this question and selects images, the essence of which can be expressed in other words:
“Well, let's take a look at what happened. Allow yourself to imagine, draw, but besides that draw whatever comes to your mind. Anything you want, imagine other disasters. And you start to see other people who find themselves in a similar situation. All these scenes are terrible, but not unique, people survive and somehow survive it all. Does this remind you of anything? Let's take a look at other times you've been terrified. Was it like that? Not?
Then let's continue: did you experience the same feeling? But you lived through that story! It looks like you will survive this time too."
Both the right psychotherapy and the dream have the same effect: they allow you to create the necessary connections in a safe environment. “The therapist empowers the trauma survivor to go back in time and tell their story in different ways, making connections between the trauma and other parts of life, thus trying to integrate the trauma into their life,” says Hartmann. "The dream fulfills some of these functions."
Once the connections between the recent disturbing event and the previous experience are established, the emotions become less intense and the trauma gradually dissolves into the patient's life.
The post-traumatic dreaming pattern was clearly evident in the reports collected since September 11, 2001 by Deirdre Barrett, a Harvard psychology professor and author of Trauma and Dreams. Particularly revealing was the story of dispatcher Daniel O'Brien, who was serving the takeoff of American Airlines Flight 77 from Dallas International Airport that tragic morning. An hour later, she saw a white dot on her radar screen - her plane - heading straight for the White House, then turn around and crash into the Pentagon building. After that, for several nights O'Brien was tormented by nightmares: "I woke up, sat in bed and relived it all, saw it again, heard it again …" But after a couple of months, the therapeutic effect that Hartmann spoke of began to take effect, and O ' Brian has changed. She dreamedthat the radar screen turned into a green pool: “It was a pool filled with some kind of gel, and I dived into it, dived into the radar screen to stop the plane,” she says. “In this dream, I didn’t do any harm to the plane, I just held it in my hand and somehow stopped everything.”
Something similar happened to a woman who was leaving the station of the New York subway just at the moment when people jumped from the windows of the burning tower of the World Trade Center - they jumped towards death. At first, she constantly saw it in a dream, but after a few weeks the dreams changed: she was no longer a helpless spectator, she handed them colored umbrellas, and they slowly glided down and landed safely.
Natural dream psychotherapy can, of course, be augmented by support from family and friends or active psychotherapy.
“But when for some reason a trauma survivor does not receive psychotherapy, studies have shown that dreams and social support from others help him,” says Barrett.
Of course, for some, the process of adjusting emotions during dreams does not work.
In 25% of cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), nightmares in which the trauma is replayed again and again are accompanied by emotional elements that transform the whole picture in a special way.
Hartmann talks about a Vietnam War veteran who was tasked with checking the body bags of dead soldiers. Not an easy task in itself, but one day he recognized the deceased as his best friend. After that, he often saw the same dream, which not only reflected this terrible experience, but in which, according to Hartmann, sounded the motive of this man's guilt due to the fact that he had survived: “I open the bags one by one to to identify the dead … I hear screams, the noise of helicopters. I open the last bag and see myself in it. I wake up from my own screams."
Scientists have studied the dreams of PTSD sufferers to understand why the brain replays terrible memories over and over again and how to get it free of them. Eric Nofzinger from the University of Pittsburgh also intends to study the brains of PTSD patients with the help of visualization: “We want to see what the brain looks like when such dreams are constantly repeated night after night”.
According to Ernest Hartmann, finding metaphors and connections to positive memories that help calm the emotional storms generated by trauma is just the most prominent example of the process that our brains are constantly engaged in.
Even in the most ordinary circumstances, he constantly builds a certain imagery related to these ordinary circumstances and events. For example, for pregnant women at the beginning of their term, dreams are typical, reflecting anxiety about the changes taking place in the body, fear of losing their visual appeal. At a later date, they often have dreams that speak of fears for the unborn child, fears about their own compliance with the role of the mother.
Long-standing worries and concerns can also be expressed metaphorically.
As an example, Hartmann often cites the story of a mother of two small children who is quite successful both in her career and in her relationship with her husband, but she grew up with parents who constantly criticized her, and therefore, no matter what she does, she is never satisfied with herself. … When she herself became a mother, her childhood anxiety about her own inadequacy was suddenly revived, and she often had dreams in which the same theme of fear that she was not a good mother arose: “I left my son alone, and a huge cat attacked him, she tore at him with her claws, she tried to kill him. " “We were staying at a beachfront hotel in Maine with both of my children in two separate rooms. The tide began, the water came in very quickly. I woke up with fear that they would drown."
Skeptics doubt: how can these night-time dramas played out by the brain help if, as soon as the curtain falls, we immediately forget them? But Hartmann, Cartwright and others believe that the main thing is the creation and restructuring of connections in neural networks, the physiological process itself, which in some cases strengthens old memories, in others it builds new associations, thus weaving new experiences into our previous experience, renewing a mental model of ourselves and the world around us. This nightly reconfiguration of connections is consistent with theories of the role of dreams in evolution: according to these theories, during dreams, the brain integrates information essential for survival, and this can happen regardless of whether we remember dreams or not.
However, this does not mean that all attempts to recall a dream are completely fruitless. Some dreams are truly devoid of any meaning, but others can help us take a different look at the emotional moments that we sometimes lose sight of during the day. The ability to remember and reflect on your dream in some cases affects both the model of future dreams and further behavior.
Some studies have shown that writing down their nightmares and then pondering them, trying not to succumb to fearful influences or coming up with a different, less dire endings, helps to change the pattern of such dreams.
There is a treatment technique called imagery rehearsal: a person who is tormented by recurring nightmares is advised to imagine this dream once a day, but with a different, positive ending, and repeat this exercise for two weeks. The changed plot forms a new strategy of repetitions, which, as it were, opens the chain of nightmares. According to Dirdre Barrett, this "mastery" of dreams not only reduces or eliminates repetitions of frightening dreams, but also has a beneficial effect on symptoms of daytime trauma reactions, such as flashbacks of the past, increased start reflex. General anxiety also automatically decreases.
Rosalind Cartwright found that even for her subjects who did not suffer from the effects of trauma, it was useful to reflect on the plots of negative dreams and imagine their positive endings - this not only allowed them to get rid of these types of dreams, but also had a positive effect on mood. As an example, she cites the story of a woman who had enough problems: she just broke up with her husband, who oppressed and humiliated her in every possible way, and at work one of the employees also tried all the time, as she said, “to put her in her place. This woman dreamed that her ex-husband showed up in her new apartment and stomped on the white carpet in dirty shoes. Cartwright advised her to think about this dream and reshape it so that she doesn't feel like a victim. After that, the woman had another dream: she was lying on the floor of the elevator,the elevator had no walls. The elevator was flying over Lake Michigan, and she was afraid to get up. However, somewhere in the depths of the dormant consciousness, apparently, a memory arose of how she reshaped the previous dream so as not to be a victim again, and in this dream about the elevator, despite her fear, she nevertheless decided to get to her feet. “As soon as she got up, the walls that gave safety grew around her, and she realized that she needed to be able to stand up for herself, and then everything would be fine,” says Cartwright.the walls that gave her safety grew around her, and she realized that she needed to be able to stand up for herself, and then everything would be all right,”says Cartwright.the walls that gave her safety grew around her, and she realized that she needed to be able to stand up for herself, and then everything would be all right,”says Cartwright.
Working on her own passivity, expressed in the plots of dreams, she was able to restructure her emotional approach so that it was reflected in everyday life: she decided to talk to her boss about a colleague who was bullying her, and the problem was solved.
“Psychotherapists could better understand their patients and see which of their problems can be solved by themselves, and in what cases help is needed if they were asked to recall the last dream they had, which is often the most negative for those who suffer from depression - says Cartwright. - Contrary to Freud's theory, the main problem is not hidden at all. She is right here on the surface."
But in order to analyze our own dreams, we need to memorize them, and most of us can remember no more than one percent of dreams.
