What Do Frequent Nightmares Really Mean?
Early one Saturday morning, a friend sent me a furious message: “It’s supposed to be my day off, and I got scared awake by a nightmare again…”
She had dreamed that she was trying to survive alone in the wilderness, only to be chased by all kinds of menacing monsters. She screamed for help at the top of her lungs, but no one answered. She woke up drenched in cold sweat. The night before, she had dreamed of being given the silent treatment in her relationship — no matter how hard she tried to communicate, her boyfriend remained utterly indifferent. She was so furious that she called him up and chewed him out for half an hour after waking up.
Even though she knew it was only a dream, the intense fear, despair, and helplessness spilled over into her waking state and left her listless for the entire day. She said in distress: work is already torturous enough — why does she have to be ‘tortured’ all over again in her dreams every night?
In medicine, frequent nightmares can be a prodrome — an early warning signal that appears before the main symptoms of an illness fully manifest, hinting that the condition may soon break out in full force. In other words, recurring nightmares may well be an alarm from your body and mind, reminding you to take a closer look at your health — both physical and psychological.
Today, from a psychological perspective, let’s talk about: what do frequent nightmares actually indicate?
Three Possible Reasons Behind Frequent Nightmares
1. Nightmares are linked to trauma and personality
Everyone has nightmares, and most of us dream remarkably similar plots: being killed, a loved one dying, being chased… After waking up, we worry whether the dream will come true, and anxiety and panic set in.
Nightmares do not predict the future. They are mainly related to personality and stress. For instance, patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have nightmares tied to their traumatic experiences.
The well-known photographer Nicolas Bruno has spoken openly about his long struggle with nightmares. He suffered from sleep paralysis from the age of seven — a state in which the mind is awake but the body cannot move, commonly known as “ghost pressing down on you” (gui ya chuang).
(Nicolas Bruno in his studio)
Almost every night, he dreamed terrifying scenes: being threatened by screaming shadows, a female ghost walking around his room, a blurry figure standing at the foot of his bed… He could not tell whether all of this was happening in his dreams or while he was awake. The nightmares deeply affected his daily life, and he grew increasingly depressed.
As an adult, he began photographing scenes from his nightmares, turning the dreams that tormented him into works of art — and that made him feel much better.
For most people, the traumatic content in dreams comes from difficult events they have experienced in real life: their parents’ divorce, the death of a relative, a car accident, a breakup or divorce, a crisis at work… But for a small number of people with sleep paralysis, the trauma is the dream itself.
The Encyclopedia of Sleep also notes that sensitive, creative, and highly imaginative people — like Bruno — are more prone to nightmares.
Everything that happens in dreams may be a repetition of childhood trauma. The “nightmare” works Bruno created are all expressions of the awful sensations he experienced during sleep paralysis: trapped in a suffocating, bubble-like space, unable to move; standing alone in the rain in a decaying black-and-white city; blindfolded, bracing for a burning chair being hurled at him…
Nightmares hide the secrets we fear most. The less we dare to gaze into the “abyss” within, the more often we will meet it in our dreams.
2. Nightmares are linked to stress on the body and mind
Beyond that, nightmares can also signal stress overload.
Research shows that people who have nightmares more than three times a week on average are 5.7 times more likely than the average person to develop a mental illness within five years.
A female patient named Lucy in a hospital illustrates how an ordinary person gradually displayed psychiatric symptoms while having nightmares. At 23, Lucy had a nightmare. Her boyfriend, lying next to her, heard her talking in her sleep — rambling things that made no sense. Lucy remembered none of it.
After that nightmare, Lucy gradually began showing symptoms of hysteria: crying one moment and laughing the next, drooling and speaking nonsense, imitating the cries of chickens and ducks… After being transferred between several hospitals, Lucy was diagnosed with autoimmune encephalitis.
Examinations revealed tumors on both of her ovaries. When the body is infected by a virus or develops a tumor, the immune system produces antibodies to destroy the virus or tumor — but this can also damage the central nervous system or brain tissue, “killing eight thousand of your own to destroy a hundred of the enemy.”
Lucy’s nightmares were a signal that her immune system was attacking her own body. After the tumors were removed, she never had that kind of nightmare again, and her life slowly returned to normal.
In 2019, researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland used brain imaging experiments to discover that during nightmares, the brain structures associated with negative emotions such as fear and anxiety become activated — an experience that is the same as, or very similar to, the neural response to real danger.
Illness, stress, and other factors weigh on the body and mind, making us feel fear and anxiety. These negative emotions surge day and night, and when they exceed what a person can normally bear, they surface through nightmares.
Carrying an overload of negative emotions for a long time throws one’s mental state off balance, and the likelihood of developing conditions such as hysteria may increase.
3. Frequent nightmares mean you haven’t felt joy in a long time
A paper published on CNKI, Brain Activity in Patients with Nightmare Disorder Under Different States, presents a set of findings: patients with nightmare disorder suffer greater physiological effects from their nightmares, and their brain activity is weaker than that of healthy volunteers.
Put simply: people who have nightmares over the long term think more slowly, have worse memory, feel more depressed, and have trouble concentrating.
Why would long-term nightmares weaken brain activity? Multiple papers point out that chronic nightmares are closely tied to inner depressive emotions.
In the paper A Study of the Clinical Characteristics of Nightmares in Adolescents with Depression, researchers compared the emotional levels of depressed and healthy adolescents. The results confirmed that depressed adolescents experience more frequent nightmare distress, and that adolescents who suffer from long-term nightmare distress also have higher suicide rates.
One of my clients mentioned during a session that she had been having frequent nightmares recently, but she attributed it to her breakup and believed her own mental state was fine. It was only when she went to a mental health center for a psychological assessment that the results showed severe depression and severe anxiety.
She broke down sobbing on the street. The diagnosis was like the last straw that crushed her — her emotions collapsed completely, and she was admitted to the mental health center for treatment that very night.
After a period of time, her nightmares improved significantly. Following her discharge, she came back to me for counseling and described the biggest change the treatment had brought her: she had made friends at the hospital who were in similar situations, and these friends made her feel happy again after a very long time.
Not feeling happy for a long time is the root of depression for many people — and also the root of frequent nightmares.
As one doctor put it: “When the brain lacks dopamine, the chemical that brings joy, a person will have vivid, lifelike nightmares over the long term.”
What occupies your thoughts by day appears in your dreams by night. Someone who isn’t happy during the day will rarely sleep well at night.
Seeing Your Emotional Problems Through Nightmares
Of course, nightmares aren’t all bad. The American neuroscientist Matthew Walker believes that one important function of nightmares is to smooth over the negative emotions accumulated during the day.
Although nightmares don’t bring peace, just as watching a horror movie can relieve stress, immersing yourself in a frightening scenario can sometimes help the brain release pressure.
So, once a nightmare happens, what can we do to ease the fear and anxiety?
1. Give your nightmare a happy ending
Research has found that imagining a good ending for a nightmare can effectively relieve the anxiety it causes.
For example, spend 5–10 minutes each day imagining a new “solution” to the dream in your mind: How do you fight back when chased? How do you make up for being late to an exam? If you’re killed in the dream, can you bring yourself back to life? Keep this up for two weeks until it’s firmly ingrained in your mind. The next time you have that dream, you’ll feel stronger.
2. Practice drawing and writing therapy
Take out a piece of paper and a pen, and say to yourself: “When I dream of a scary scene, what hero can I draw or describe to make myself less afraid?”
If you practice repeatedly through drawing or writing, the frequency of your nightmares will very likely decrease.
Consider the painter Henry Fuseli’s work The Nightmare — he depicted his own dream with a bold, avant-garde composition. This painting went on to inspire the poet Shelley and the novelist Edgar Allan Poe, and it became the most famous work of Henry’s career.
If nightmares trouble you, try to sublimate them — it may bring unexpected surprises.
3. Use mindfulness meditation to relax body and mind
A paper published in the journal Pain in July 2022 showed that mindfulness can effectively relieve physical and mental pain. Whether the pain comes from stress or from illness, long-term mindfulness meditation practice can help us reduce both stress and pain.
In addition, we can also do some more everyday relaxation exercises: try listening to light, soothing music before bed; get yourself a more comfortable duvet; take a bath, soak your feet, or read before sleep…
If you find that none of the above methods work and that nightmares are seriously disrupting your daily life, it’s time to seek guidance and help from a professional.
In Closing
Having nightmares doesn’t mean your brain is hurting you. On the contrary, it means your brain is sending you a warning — your body is working hard to protect you.
As Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis, said: “The content of dreams is the formation of a wish; its purpose is to fulfill that wish.”
Whether good dreams or nightmares, all dreams are a reflection of the unconscious. We need to find the key that reveals our inner wishes and open the door to understanding ourselves.
The parts of ourselves we ignore or that have been hurt in daily life can all be brought into awareness through our dreams.
Unlike other things in life, a dream doesn’t belong to anyone else — it truly belongs to you and you alone.
May you see yourself and understand yourself through your dreams, and then, in reality, protect yourself and take care of yourself.
