16 hours ago
From ageing faster to early death, how nightmares really affect you according to a dream expert
Waking up in a cold sweat, with your heart pounding and your thoughts racing can be an unsettling experience. Anyone that has experienced regular nightmares will know that a night of bad dreams can rattle you for hours after you wake, leaving an eerie feeling that lingers well into the next day.
But it's not just your breakfast that a chaotic dream episode might ruin, as a major study has now linked a higher frequency of nightmares to faster biological ageing and earlier death in humans.
New findings from scientists at London's Imperial College reveal that adults who report weekly nightmares are more than three times likely to die before the age of 70, compared to those who rarely or never experience them.
As unpleasant as bad dreams can be, leading dream psychologist Ian Wallace believes that nightmares are nothing for us to fear. In fact, he reckons they hold vital clues to our deepest emotional states, allowing us to pinpoint anxieties and stresses in our waking life that we need to resolve.
We all know that dreaming about contentedly lazing on a desert island feels vastly different from being chased by a predator on the loose, but Wallace says that dreams and nightmares are cut from the same cerebral cloth.
"The reality is that a nightmare is still a dream. It's still part of the dreaming process, but it tends to be more vivid, intense, scary and emotional," he explains.
"The fundamental reason why we dream, neurologically speaking, is to process emotions. So if you are experiencing powerful, unresolved emotions in waking life, then you will typically generate more nightmares," he adds.
"People think that nightmares are happening to them, but in reality, you happen to the dream – and you create everything that you experience in it. In this way, a nightmare is just a sign of a powerful emotion that you are experiencing in waking life, that your brain is trying to resolve."
Ongoing chronic stress in waking life is one of the most common triggers for night terrors, but there are other factors at play too.
"Poor sleep quality is another key culprit," Wallace notes. "People often go on holiday and experience lots of nightmares, and that's usually because their brains are adjusting to a different time zone. They might also be drinking more alcohol, which can further disrupt sleep rhythms during the night."
If you often nod off on your commute and wake up in a panic, there's a reason why shorter naps can be more nightmarish than a lengthy sleep in bed.
"When we take a brief nap, we experience these things called 'hypnogogic hallucinations', which is when dream imagery comes into our mind, but we're not yet processing it in dream sleep," Wallace explains. "Those can be quite unsettling and a bit nightmarish feeling, as we're essentially not tipping over into a deeper type of rest.'
Existing unresolved trauma, substance abuse and certain medications, such as antidepressants and beta-blockers, can also trigger a higher frequency of nightmares.
Wallace says it's not cheese itself, but instead the effect certain foods can have on the body that can cause strange dreams and nightmares.
"The more digestible a food, the more relaxed your body will be when you are asleep," he explains. "Like most other fatty foods, cheese takes quite a bit of effort to digest so it causes our sleep to be restless, making us more likely to drift in and out of wakefulness.
"This makes us far more aware of our dream content and, because our body isn't fully relaxed, our dream content is often less than relaxing as well. Other foods, such as hot curries or anything particularly spicy, can also cause similar levels of restlessness, as will any heavy meal eaten just before you go to sleep."
Not according to Wallace. He sees nightmares as a symptom of chronic stress, rather than the cause.
"If you have unresolved emotions or you're physically tense in some way, then I would imagine that could lead to acceleration in the ageing process, as found in the new research from Imperial College," he notes.
As studies have previously revealed, chronic stress can have a seriously negative effect on our health, leading to high blood pressure, a weakened immune system, digestive problems and depression.
"But this is why nightmares can actually be useful experiences," Wallace remarks, "as they're your brain alerting you to the fact you're stressed and that you need to take action to resolve it.
"What people always say about nightmares is that they feel out of control," he continues. "And if you're in a place where you can't manage your emotions in waking life, you're likely to feel that same helplessness in dreams."
Psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung have long theorised that the symbols in our dreams hold deeper meaning, but Wallace suggests we should analyse them with more of an abstract lens.
"People tend to take dream imagery quite literally, but because it's imaginal, it's more like an analogy for something in waking life," he notes.
Dreaming about death doesn't mean someone will die. Instead, Wallace says, it often symbolises an ending of one way of life and the start of a new one.
"The death in your dream indicates that an aspect of your life that no longer serves you is being transformed in some way," he explains. "This transformation is often the result of a major change in your waking life where you have the opportunity to let go of old habits and welcome new ways of doing things into your life."
He says a death dream is "reassuring" as you are reaching the end of a particular period of activity in your life. "By releasing yourself from your past, you have the freedom to step into a new future," he adds.
Take nightmares about intruders, for instance. "If you dream about someone breaking into your house, you're not necessarily dreaming about a real break-in," Wallace says. "In dream language, the house often symbolises the self, because, just like us, it has an inside and an outside."
Burglars or attackers in this context can represent internalised fear or emotional violation. "Dreaming of someone entering your home could reflect a sense of being emotionally intruded upon or feeling that your boundaries are being crossed in real life," explains Wallace.
Being chased is another common scenario that tends to plague our sleep, he says. "If you're having a nightmare where you're being followed, it usually means there's something you're pursuing in waking life, like an ambition, a goal, something you're striving for. And the figure chasing you symbolises the challenge or pressure you're personally feeling in that pursuit."
Finally, the classic nightmare scenario of your teeth falling out might not necessarily mean you've been neglecting the dentist. "In waking life, you tend to show your teeth in two key situations: when you're smiling and feeling confident, or when you're being assertive, like a snarl," Wallace says. "So teeth in dreams often represent personal power and confidence.
"When people describe this dream, they often say their teeth are 'crumbling', and that's the same language we use when confidence starts to collapse," he elaborates. "So, dreaming your teeth are falling out could reflect a fear of losing your ability to 'chew over' or handle a situation."
Read more about dreams:
Dreams more vivid than usual right now? Here's why, and what they could mean (Yahoo Life UK, 8-min read)
12 common dreams and what they could mean, according to experts (Yahoo News UK, 5-min read)
Dreaming about your ex? Sleep expert explains what it really means (Yahoo Life UK, 7-min read)
