Common Dreams # 2: Bad Dreams

From time to time, most people remember a dream. Some people are lucky and they remember a dream or a dream fragment each week, and some even more frequently than that. Hard psychological research on dreams is almost nonexistent. Most scientists will tell you that dream activity might be a result of random brain activity; other researchers might tell you that there appears to be some connection between content of dreams and the activities of the preceding day. Almost everyone would agree that stress, anxiety, and trauma effect sleep and dreams.

HOWEVER, there is a rich, deep, and abundant amount of literature on the meaning of dreams that can be discovered in psychoanalytical and analytical psychology. Freud, a psychoanalyst, published his first book in 1900 and it was called "The Interpretation of Dreams." Jung, Freud's contemporary, developed his own ideas about the human psyche and established analytical psychology. In Jung's framework, dreams are profoundly meaningful; they provide data about the emotional, psychological, and sometimes physical health of the dreamer. Understanding dreams brings about a greater amount of self understanding, which ultimately may lead to a happier, less stressful and more fulfilling life.

After approximately 15 years of analysis, hard academic work, and after reading hundreds upon hundreds of dreams sent to me by people from all around the world, I decided to write a series of articles about the meaning of most common dream symbols. This is what I often tell people before I attempt to interpret a dream: Dreams are messages from the unconscious. They are pathways through which we communicate with ourselves and with the collective. Dreams speak to us in symbols. They are never wrong, but we are often not able to understand their meaning because we don't know the language of symbols, and sometimes our conscious minds are unwilling to hear and see the message (Amar, 2007). The language of symbols is well established and goes back to the beginning of time.

One way that we can understand dream symbols is to look at what they mean collectively. A symbol represents a similar type of a thing for each dreamer. However, our own psychological, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual needs are specific. Therefore it is important to understand the collective meaning of a dream symbol and then to connect it to our own personal life and to our life's journey. Not all dreams are created equal; some are more important and more meaningful than others.

Each article will discuss the possible meaning of a group of related dream symbols. Please don't expect that I will tell you exactly what your specific dream means. Nobody can do that for you, without knowing a lot about you and without spending time with you on decoding the dream. If you have a desire to know what you dreams are telling you, then you must have the patience to think it through; the patience to get general information and then to apply it to your specific situation. This is really not that hard to do, once you get the idea you will be able to get more meaning out of your dreams than you did before. (After all of these years, I still need help understanding some of my dreams, and for this I turn to my analyst.) The information that I am going to share with you is really good and very helpful. This time we are going to discuss unpleasant, bad, and very bad dreams, which may or may not be nightmares.

What is a nightmare?

A nightmare isahorribly frightening dream that wakes you up. Typically you know that you had a nightmare because you woke up out of fear and with a need to escape the dream situation. People who suffer from PTSD might have nightmares that very much resemble the actual traumatic event that they experienced. In other words, nightmares seem to be a natural response to trauma. It is believed that as we attempt to accept horrible life events (for some of us it might be a matter of accepting the unacceptable); our dreams reflect the psychic process of integration and acceptance. Soon after the traumatic even, you might have a lot of nightmares, but with time and acceptance your nightmares should become less and less frequent. Night terror experienced by some children is different from adult nightmares and not the topic of this discussion.

If you did not experience a singular traumatic event in your life, or a period of trauma (such as war), but you still have relatively regular nightmares, you should think about the level of fear in your life and your negative and hurtful experiences. During times of high stress and transitions, some people may have an occasional nightmare, which can be explained and related to current life events. However, regular nightmares without corresponding traumatic or very difficult experiences are unusual.

Bad dreams are relatively common and not all bad dreams are considered nightmares. If you don't wake up in a middle of a bad dream, then it is probably not a nightmare. In my experience, bad dreams can fall into a few categories, or we can categorize bad dreams according to their content. The three large categories include:

1. Creepy dreams - the strangeness and unpleasantness of these dreams might stay with you for a few hours, or for a day or two. Sometimes we remember bad creepy dreams for a long time. What is creepy to one person might not be creepy to another, but some creepiness might be universally agreed upon. For example, if in the dream you were walking through a strange city and weird looking people were engaging in unusual behaviors, or talking and interacting with you. The dream environment and the people in it might be frightening and undesirable, but the essential impression of the dream is that of something unnatural. For example, people eating bloody, raw meat, humans with clearly defined genitals that do not seem to match their gender, and dreams with sexual activities that you don't normally engage in or find desirable.
2. Violent dreams - witnessing violence, being a victim of violence, or being violet yourself could be experienced in a disturbing and very bad dream. It could be violence against strangers, you personally, or someone that you love. The violence in the dream may not reflect what you actually experienced, but could include themes of war and large scale destruction. Sometimes mothers and fathers have dreams that their children are being hurt and that they are unable to help them. People can have dreams with blood and gore as a general theme.
3. End of the world dreams - many people report to having apocalyptic dreams. In these types of dreams there is a large scale event, either man made or naturally occurring, which appears to be leading to the end of the world. The dream events include earthquakes, volcanic explosions, nuclear war, title waves, and cosmic events such as explosions of the sun or the moon.

Carl Jung told us that dreams have an important compensatory function; they serve to balance the psyche. This might often be true for many dream symbols and themes. However, most people who have regular bad dreams would tell you that their daily life is not perfect, or filled with overabundance of joy, happiness, or peace. The compensation theory might fall a bit short in explaining chronic bad dreams of ordinary people.

Alternatively, if an ordinary person experiences ongoing stress and unhappiness, I think that the bad dreams are a reflection of a psyche that is out of balance. This individual is unable to get rest while they sleep and is vulnerable to many psychical and psychological conditions that have the potential to lower the overall quality of life. If you are a person who has ongoing bad and disturbing dreams, my best advice to you is to go to psychotherapy with a licensed psychologist. The psychologist does not need to be an expert in dream interpretation, but if he or she is a good psychologist they will be able to help you to increase in self-awareness, which will lead to solutions to everyday difficulties, and result in overall improvement of your emotional health and well being.

It would be wise to understand the meaning of your bad dreams, especially if you have then regularly or often enough. As with all other dream interpretation: keep a dream journal, use good dream dictionaries, and connect general information about a specific symbol to your daily life or a specific situation. The professionals that are best equipped to help you with dream interpretation are psychoanalysis (which means that they are analytical psychologists or professionals trained in Freudian psychoanalysis).

Amar, S. (2007). The Bedside Dream Dictionary. NY: Skyhorse Publishing.