When I was a child, I had a dream that repeated itself for years.
It wasn’t a pleasant dream, and I still remember the feeling of trying to control how it ended. The outcome I feared never came, but I seemed to forget about it whenever the dream came back.
Many readers can probably relate to this experience.
We spend about a third of our lives sleeping, and the dreams we have in this state are of great interest. They bring experiences on a sensory, emotional and mental level. Although they can be produced at any stage of sleep, dreams are more frequent during REM sleep.
Although not all people remember the stories lived during the night’s rest, some have recurring dreams – with the same content, which are repeated. In fact, about 75% of adults report having had recurring dreams at some point in their lives.
Some of the more typical recurring dreams make us feel that we are being persecuted, that we are losing our teeth, that we are falling into the void, or that we appear in public naked or wearing strange clothes.
That is, most of these dreams have a negative aspect. And they often arise during times of stress and psychological distress.
Why do they happen? Can we do something to eliminate them?
To answer these questions, it is first necessary to analyze, in a general way, why we dream.
Consolidation of memories and training
There is no scientific consensus on the origin and function of dreams, but we know that they are usually linked to experiences stored in memory. It is likely that they are related to the integration of our experiences.
According to some models, dreams may be the result of a process of consolidation of memories, produced by the reactivation of brain areas related to memory. Thus, there would be a kind of script stored in our mind and its activation would produce the emergence of the dream.
On the other hand, it has been conjectured that dreaming has a relevant role from an evolutionary point of view: it would serve to train escape behaviors or avoid threatening situations.
Types of recurring dreams
First, it is important to differentiate between recurring dreams that are part of a pathology and those whose cause is unknown and not associated with health problems.
The latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), published by the American Psychiatric Association, lists two disorders that have this type of repeated dream experience as one of their main symptoms: nightmare and post-traumatic stress disorder.
These two disorders constitute psychopathologies, that is, they cause clinical deterioration and clearly interfere in the life of the affected person.
In the case of post-traumatic stress disorder, it is very common for people to feel the exact repetition of the traumatic event experienced. Idiopathic recurring dreams (with no known cause) are related to more general themes, such as the loss of a loved one or the end of a relationship.
Universal, but also very personal
To understand these dreams, several factors need to be considered.
On the one hand, there are dreams common to different times or cultures. Some of the most common, as we have already indicated, are falling into the void, suffering an attack or persecution, trying to do something several times or feeling that the teeth are falling out.
This last dream has already been associated with some process of dental irritation, which would indicate the possibility that certain sensory stimuli would be incorporated into the dreams.
Other dreams, such as falling, are often accompanied by muscle tremors and sometimes occur just as we are starting to sleep.
This experience is called hypnagogic tremor or myoclonic spasm. It may be a response to the brain’s attempt to continue to control the body during the transition between wakefulness and sleep.
On the other hand, despite the existence of common themes, the repetition of the same dream frequently in the same person indicates that its meaning is related to psychological factors. Thus, the content can change over time and has a different meaning for each individual.
Recurring dreams are often produced during periods of stress, although there are people who experience them for years or even their entire lives. In some cases, they disappear when the person’s mood improves, but reappear when it gets worse again. Lack of sleep, for example, has been linked to repeated nightmares.
Therefore, although there are some hypotheses about the concrete contents repeated or about their relationship with people’s concerns, we still do not know how to explain why there are themes that appear more frequently than others.
Reflection of our concerns
The continuity hypothesis states that dreams reflect states and concerns present during wakefulness.
Therefore, they are more likely to be negative if people suffer from psychological distress. On the other hand, recurrent nightmares are more frequent in people who are anxious or tend to experience negative emotions with great intensity.
It should also be noted that recurring dreams are produced more often in people who feel that their psychological needs are frustrated.
In addition, people who had recurring dreams and stopped having them begin to dream about more positive things, even compared to those who never had this kind of dream experience. This observation would support the theory that there is a relationship between dreams and psychological adaptation.
Dreams that recur may reflect some kind of unresolved concern or conflict that the person needs to process and face. Hence, they play an important role in emotion regulation. Dreaming would serve as a kind of training.
Can we do something to eliminate them?
Recurring dreams usually do not cause serious problems, so there is no need for treatment.
But some people decide to try to reduce them with psychological interventions. These interventions achieved improvements – even in cases of post-traumatic dreams.
On the other hand, training with the so-called lucid dreams – when we are aware of what we are dreaming – would allow us to modify the experience during the episode.
Therefore, if we have recurring dreams, in principle we should not worry. But if we feel that they are causing great disruption in our lives or that they may be a reaction to some underlying problem, we can see a specialist.
* Laura RÃo MartÃnez is a doctor in psychology, researcher and professor at the International University of Valencia, Spain.
This article was originally published on the academic news site The Conversation and republished under a Creative Commons license. Read the original Spanish version here.
Text published in https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/geral-62906554
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