In childhood, I had a recurring nightmare I can still remember as vividly as if I had experienced it last night. I was playing in my mother’s garden when a strange man approached, setting off an epic chase scene. Unsuccessful in escaping him, I was captured and thrown into a giant, Santa Claus-style rucksack, where I spent the rest of my dream alone, in utter darkness — terrified of whether I’d make it out alive.
Dreams in which you’re being chased are actually the most common type of nightmare to have in childhood, says Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., a dream researcher at Harvard University and author of “The Committee of Sleep.” In general, you tend to have fewer nightmares as you age, although some people remember their dreams — and nightmares — more often than others, Barrett said.
While we always experience dreams during the rapid-eye movement (REM) cycle of sleep, we only remember them when we wake up during this cycle. That may be why people with insomnia, for example, report nightmares more frequently: because they wake up in REM more often.
There are two tiers of nightmares: those that instill a sense of terror or distress among the dreamer, and those that more closely resemble flashbacks from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and transport the dreamer to a specific past event. While some people have even reported enjoying the former — like going to a horror movie to get an adrenaline rush — the latter form of nightmares are far more traumatic, Barrett said. So-called post-traumatic nightmares also happen at all stages of the sleep cycle, not just in REM sleep, which further distinguishes them from regular nightmares and indicates they may be physiologically similar to flashbacks that occur in waking life, she added.
Sometimes, run-of-the-mill nightmares occur as a result of events in waking life such as watching a horror film or having an anxiety-invoking day at work, but it’s still not entirely clear why we have them. Sigmund Freud famously posited that dreams were an expression of unconscious desire, although his hypothesis has been disputed and others have instead suggested that dreams might be a way to process the day’s events or rehearse threatening situations for the future.
Although Barrett strays away from ascribing universal meaning to dreams and encourages dreamers to interpret their dreams for themselves, Salon asked her to unpack what’s going on with five commonly reported nightmares.
01 Death — your own, or a loved one's
Throughout the pandemic, Barrett surveyed more than 9,000 dreamers to understand how their dreams were impacted by COVID-19. What she found was that people reported three times as many nightmares about dying or witnessing the death of a loved one in pandemic times than a control group of dreamers pre-pandemic. Another report published in the Frontiers of Psychology similarly found death was the second most common theme reported in pandemic dreams — apart from COVID-19 itself.
Interestingly, Barrett noticed that parents of young children or caretakers usually dreamt about others dying, while people who didn’t have caretaking responsibilities usually dreamt about themselves dying. While some dreams about death were gory, like the dreamer watching the dead be embalmed in a cemetery, others involved death but weren’t particularly horrific, like the dreamer having a picnic with the dead. Regardless, dreams about dying could be symbolic of a closing chapter or major transition in the dreamer's life. After all, the pandemic caused major life transitions for many.
“Ask yourself: What would be different about watching someone else die than knowing you’re about to die?” Barrett told Salon in a phone interview. “Think about why you’re dreaming about that happening to someone else and whether you’re feeling desperately responsible for it in the dream or more removed from it.”
02 Failing, feeling shame or getting embarrassed
In the 2018 survey, the second most common nightmare people reported was missing deadlines, feeling helpless or failing. This kind of dream doesn’t invoke the same terror that some other nightmares, like those that threaten your life, do. Instead of triggering the primal fear that other kinds of nightmares do, these dreams — which Barrett called “embarrassment dreams,” including your teeth falling out or showing up naked to a public place — seem to be activated by anxiety instead.
A widely cited study in the journal Sleep found people with more anxiety in their waking life generally have more nightmares. People who have more social anxiety might be more likely to have dreams in which they’re naked in public, for example, while people who are more anxious about being judged by authority figures may have more dreams about failing a test, forgetting about it or showing up late, Barrett said. “Being tested,” and “naked and afraid,” for example, are both anxiety-provoking metaphors we use in everyday life that could play out in nightmares, she added.
“To the extent that a few of those [dreams] with that content have a very standard symbolic meaning in our culture, the dream is likely to be representing that,” she said. “Although it may still convey something more quirky in that person's set of individual symbols.”
03 Experiencing the climate crisis — even in your sleep
After climate disasters like wildfires or hurricanes, nightmares about these phenomena can increase among those affected or even those who are at a distance but immersed in news about them, Barrett said. For example, after a major 1989 earthquake in San Francisco, a study published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology found 40% of dreamers surveyed were having nightmares about earthquakes three weeks after the disaster, compared to 5% of dreamers in a control group.
Although it’s difficult to isolate climate change as a factor affecting dreams because the globe has progressively been warming for decades and it is also tied to increases in population density and all sorts of other factors, Barrett said she has heard people recall dreams that do seem to be tied to concerns related to the climate crisis. In other words, climate anxiety may be invading the dream space, too.
“There’s a hypothesis that’s very well proven across all kinds of things that people dream about the same things they are concerned about by day,” Barrett said. “That would predict that more people should have dreams that have something to do with the climate crisis now than they did many decades back.”
04 Free falling — and then being startled awake
Some nightmares end with the dreamer being startled awake after falling from a cliff or some other extreme height. Interestingly, most dreamers startle awake from “falling” without the visual elements of a nightmare, Barrett said. Although it's not entirely clear what causes this sensation, it's common among dreamers and there are many hypotheses on why it happens, ranging from our distant ancestors living in trees and needing this sensation to ensure they didn't fall out, to a physiological process called a hypnic jerk.
Typically when the body sleeps, the thalamus, which dictates our state of consciousness, is inhibited. It could be that when the body is falling asleep, signals sent by the balance centers in the inner ear are misinterpreted by the brain to be the sensation of falling just as the thalamus goes back online, making you lose your sense of space. This may happen on any given night while you’re unconsciously sleeping, but you’ll only feel it when the order of signals in the brain gets mixed up such that you feel the signals when you are partly conscious and are therefore startled awake by it, Barrett said.
“Once in a while, if that happens just before our consciousness is damped down quite as much as it usually is for sleep, that seems to result in people noticing this sense that their body is wildly moving around in random ways, and interpreted as falling,” Barrett said. “If anything very alarms you during sleep, that’s a wake-up cue.”
05 Being chased, by someone or something
Although being chased in dreams becomes less frequent with age, it’s still a nightmare for many adults. Children often report being chased by evil characters, monsters or animals in their nightmares, which could be an evolutionary adaptation, Barrett said. When human beings were living in the wild, it may have been beneficial to children’s survival for them to “rehearse” escaping predators in their dreams, she explained.
However, adults more frequently report other humans chasing them, rather than animals or monsters, and there’s usually some metaphor attached to the chase, Barrett said.
“There's one chapter in my book, ‘Trauma and Dreams,’ about how a group of immigrants from South American countries, all of which had ongoing civil wars, were being pursued either by the government forces or guerrillas, who were potentially trying to harm them, [and they were] sometimes physically being chased,” Barrett said.
One study in the journal Dreaming found that 80% of our dreams involve day-to-day situations and not fantastical chase scenes or other apocalyptic nightmares. Yet it's the latter that sticks around to haunt us for hours, days or even years thereafter. The activation-synthesis theory of dreaming posits that dreams are the way we process random activity from our neurological systems in REM sleep. That is, the dream is a visual representation of emotions sent forth from the body. Ultimately, it's up to the individual dreamer to reconcile what those visual interpretations mean for them.
"Sometimes they will be representing something that we have not realized by day or that we have repressed by day," Barrett said. "Our unconscious is either alerting us to it, giving us another angle on it, or telling us something about why this thing that happened yesterday really resonated with something very bad in our past."
