When Fear Comes Out at Night: Nightmares Analyzed
Do you ever have dreams that give you the goosebumps? Do you experience reoccurring nightmares that keep you up at night? With Halloween rapidly creeping around the corner, we want to explore what nightmares are, why we experience them, and how we can prevent those terrifying scares that crawl into and disturb our sleep.
According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, nightmares are coherent dream sequences that seem real and become increasingly more disturbing as they unfold. These dreams are oftentimes focused on physical danger and other distressing themes.
Why so scared?
Many factors can trigger nightmares. Stress and anxiety are two reoccurring variables that cause you to have a nightmare. Other causes include irregular sleep, medications, mental health disorders, and eating before bed.
Most people experience sporadic nightmares at one point or another, but did you know that there is such a thing as nightmare disorder? This is a disorder that occurs when someone has frequent nightmares that interfere with their sleep, mood, and/or daytime functioning. These nightmares occur in the sleep cycle's latter stages and are most common in children.
Types of Nightmares
While the presence of nightmares has increased over the years, there is a variety of sleep disorders that may differ from person to person. Let’s explore some of these contrasting forms of nightmares:
Sleep terrors, sometimes called night terrors, is a sleep disorder that occurs when someone sits up in bed with a loud scream or cry and a look of intense fear.
Confusional arousals occur when someone wakes up in a confused state and may display disoriented behavior. Mumbled speech, memory impairment, and confusion are symptoms of this nighttime occurrence.
The feeling of “falling” in our sleep is also very common. Hypnic jerk, the feeling one gets when being woken up from a nightmare, are involuntary movements in our muscles known as myoclonus.
Sleep-related hallucinations occur when someone has a realistic awareness of the presence of someone or something that isn’t there. These tend to take place when you fall asleep or wake up.
We know that you can’t control your dreams, but there are preventative steps you can take to limit the number of nightmares you encounter. Try practicing stress-relieving activities, establish a comfortable and relaxing pre-bedtime routine, or imagine an alternative and joyous ending to your nightmare. If you continue having problems, contact a board-certified sleep medicine physician.
You don’t have to keep putting up with sleepless nights. At FusionSleep®, we have dedicated our entire medical practice to helping patients as young as two years old get their lives back through healthy sleep. We offer various sleep solutions, in-lab and at-home sleep testing options, and virtual appointments on our established telemedicine platform. Contact us today on our website or by calling 678.990.3962.