Could your nightmares actually lessen your daytime fears? Dietitian Lucy Carey explores the role of dreaming in fear reduction.
I clambered down the stairs, clutching my newborn to my chest tightly and praying the sound of running feet on the floors above us would muffle our own scramble to safety.
My heart beat wildly as my brain whirred through every scenario before us. The exits were all blocked. Our best option was to hide. I would be ready to fight if needed, but the safest bet was to keep very still and very quiet. My stomach squirmed as I opened the small storage unit under the old staircase and and shut us in. I had to keep the baby quiet. Any crying would give us away.
The terrorist might hear us.
As my son began to whimper, I tried to keep my heart-rate steady. He could surely feel my fear and it was unsettling him. He began to cry. Louder and louder until I lurched awake shakily.
It had all been a dream. I held my newborn close in real life and fed him, refusing to put him down for a very long time after that. It was my third dream about protecting this beautiful new life from a terrorist attack.
Thankfully, it was also my last. At least, the last I remember. If you awaken from deep slow-wave sleep, you likely won’t remember what you dreamed at all. But add a newborn to the mix and you might just find that you are awoken in the middle of REM sleep. When you’re awoken suddenly like that, the chances of remembering your dreams are closer to 80-90%.
My hungry little baby woke a lot in those early days and I came to the realisation that my dreams were all utterly terrifying. I might have been afraid to go to sleep because of it, but I was so tired I had no energy to fear the dreams that might come!
It wasn’t until a few years later, when I was studying the science of sleep, that I read about the role REM sleep is hypothesised to have with fear.
It was like jigsaw puzzle pieces clicking into place in my brain. It all made sense: my nightmares during those early baby days had occurred for a very specific reason – to lessen my fears.
There are 5 stages of sleep. There are many fascinating sleep studies but scientists are still nailing down exactly what each phase of sleep does. REM sleep, often known as dream sleep, is the last stage of sleep, where the brain is the most active. There are a lot of different ideas about why we dream and no is really quite sure. But fear extinction definitely seems to be a part of it.
An MRI study showed that people who has frightening dreams during the night, showed a decreased response to frightening stimuli during the day. This suggests that our dreams prepare us for our real lives. Like a kind of subconscious training. We dream about the scary thing so that if it actually happens in real life, we are more prepared for it.
We know without a doubt that sleep in general has a phenomenal affect on our physical and mental health (and I’ve written about that here), but I don’t think we talk enough about the role of sleep on our emotional health. With all of my clients (and particularly those who binge eat), I ask about their sleep patterns and give some tips and tricks around sleeping well. Even if we didn’t tweak their nutrition, even if we never talked about emotional regulation techniques, I am absolutely convinced that if we did nothing but work on fixing their sleep, it would lessen their binge eating episodes.
When I had my second baby and found myself thrown back into a stage of life where I was awoken suddenly during REM sleep, I felt more prepared for the scary dreams. Life had changed in the intervening years and the dreams reflected what I was most afraid of at that point in my life. But I found that knowing that it was a way my body was preparing myself for the pressures and responsibilities before me calmed me. I wasn’t fearful of nightmares. In fact, I welcomed the dreams because my mindset was that it just made me a calmer person during my waking hours.