Anxiety dreams.
How many of your dreams are delightful, inspiring, creative, and uplifting? How many are mundane? How many are terrifying nightmares? And how many are stressful – not exactly in the scary nightmare category, but unsettling, anxiety-ridden dreams?
It’s estimated that over half our dreams are ‘anxiety dreams’, although it’s possible that we sleep through many of our more pleasant dreams and tend to remember those that wake us up: the nightmares and stressful dreams.
When you feel fear, stress, or anxiety in a dream, the fear and stress hormones – adrenalin and cortisol – get pumped into your bloodstream. A terrifying nightmare usually pumps so much adrenalin and cortisol into your body that you startle awake, convinced that something scary really did happen, your heart beating madly, and your body primed to run, fight, or freeze. Less scary but stressful dreams drip feed these hormones into your body, maybe waking you, maybe half-waking you, maybe causing you to toss and turn, and generally leaving you feeling anxious and stressed in the morning. Not a good way to start your day.
Why do we have anxiety dreams?
Our dreams process our recent waking life experiences, so if you’ve had a stressful day, or if you’re feeling anxious – consciously or unconsciously – your dreaming mind will work through these feelings, either simply reflecting them or trying to resolve them. Such dreams can alert you to levels of stress and anxiety you may be trying to repress. They can also help you, once you explore them, to understand the deeper basis of your stress or anxiety, giving you powerful personal insight that you can use to manage or defuse these feelings.
Dreams are generally bizarre, surreal, and symbolic, so you might not be able to relate that stressful dream of not being able to find your plane ticket to your waking life where you have no plane trips planned for a long time. That’s when you need to employ your dream interpretation tools (or consult a professional dream analyst or dream therapist) to discover the waking life connection and the insight this delivers.
But some anxiety dreams look more lifelike. Let’s take the example of dreaming about an exam the day before you’re due to sit it.
In 2014, neurologist Isabelle Arnulf surveyed students sitting the Sorbonne University medical school entrance exam. Places in the medical school are highly competitive, and only 10% of students sitting this exam get accepted. Apparently stress levels run extremely high. Arnulf surveyed the students’ sleep and dreams the night before the exam. Just over 60% of the 719 students who responded to the survey reported dreams about the exam, and 78% of these dreams featured problems such as being late or forgetting answers.
Here’s the kicker:
Students who reported an exam dream on the eve of the exam performed better in the actual exam than those who didn’t report an exam dream.
It also turned out that the frequency of exam-related dreams over a period of time also predicted success: those who dreamed of the subject more frequently performed better in the exam.
The study concluded that dreams simulating the exam create cognitive change: they prepare the student to perform well.
This fits the theory that in processing our recent experiences, as well as our stress and anxiety, dreams provide us with dress rehearsals for life. (For more on this, see my blog, Are dreams rehearsals for life?)
And yet, while this may be sometimes true, I wonder whether students who were particularly stressed in the exam study were motivated to study and do practise papers in the weeks leading up to the exam, so that they were more prepared through study (rather than through their anxiety dreams).
Anxiety dreams are very common, and usually recurring. Recurring dreams reflect recurring waking life situations. If these dreams were rehearsals training us for success, wouldn’t they stop once we had learned the skills?
Whether or not anxiety dreams are dress rehearsals is still hotly debated.
In the meantime, how can we handle these dreams?
One of the troubles with anxiety dreams is that they can disrupt our sleep. It can be difficult to get back to sleep when those adrenalin and cortisol hormones are racing around making you alert and hypervigilant, or just plain stressed and anxious. Lack of sleep after such a night can lead to a more challenging day, triggering more stress and anxiety to be processed in the following night’s sleep.
One quick tip, if you are awoken by an anxiety dream, is to engage physiological calm by breathing in for a count of four, and out for a count of six. Repeat about ten times. You can change the count numbers: the key is to breathe out for longer than you breathe in. Make sure you feel comfortable doing this. No stress or strain, just easy breathing focussing on breathing out for longer than you breathe in. And take those breaths right down deep into your belly. This changes the physiological state of your body by engaging your parasympathetic nervous system which imparts calm.
Don’t dismiss these dreams as ‘just’ being anxiety dreams!
There is so much insight to be gained from exploring and interpreting your unique anxiety dream, insight that provides you with the tools to both manage the anxiety and resolve the underlying issues.
