Treating Nightmares, and Working with the Unconscious

 Treating Nightmares, and Working with the Unconscious

I don’t interpret the symbols of dreams for therapeutic purposes. However, the emotions of dreams can be very useful for significant healing.

There is a lot we don’t know about dreams in the scientific community, but the general theory is that dream content is synthesized from material already within the brain. This happens most during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, where it is thought that information is integrated into long-term memory. The material might be new, or it might be very old, and can include cognitive content (details) and emotional content.

The various images thrown together on the dream stage can be pleasurable, boring, frustrating, embarrassing, or terrifying. They might be random, or the brain may create images to help integrate an emotional memory without attached cognitive details.

Some nightmares happen sporadically, and the fear fades quickly after you wake up. These dreams do not necessarily implicate unprocessed emotions–they could just be random.

But some nightmares occur frequently, and the panic continues after you wake up. This indicates that the content of the dream triggered a stored emotion; something the brain held onto and is still afraid of. The content of the dream might directly match identifiable memories (e.g., a soldier might relive battle scenes in dreams). If recalling the content of the dream evokes emotions, the person can pay attention to those emotions, name them, identify them in the body, and use them to identify other identifiable traumas for processing. The dream is the brain’s effort to process those emotions. If no cognitive memory can be linked to the emotion, we can assume the emotion stems from unconscious memory. This kind of trauma can get stored if it happens before a child develops language (which aids in cognitive memory formation), or if a person dissociates from it–it gets blocked out as a coping mechanism to reduce incidence of triggering. Though somewhat more difficult, we can still process the emotion by having the person feel it, name it, and have it play out in a safe environment.

Here’s a case study about this process, conducted on my beloved wife Kaprena:

Kaprena had suffered from night terrors and recurring nightmares ever since she could remember. The recurring scenarios were natural disasters with her children, being paralyzed next to a murderer, or finding that everyone around her was psychotic. She had always felt a slight “hum” of anxiety that made it difficult for her to fall asleep. While lying awake, she could not identify the source of this anxiety because it was too faint to track.

One night, she woke up in a panic. Rather than pull out her phone and distract herself from the emotion as she usually did, she woke me up and we started exploring it. The term that described the feeling best was “no help,” and Kaprena cried and breathed heavily while we just sat with the feeling. She could not recall an experience where she felt this way other than previous dreams, so we just sat through the feeling without an accompanying narrative until she no longer reacted to the thought of “no help.”

The next day, we called her parents to ask about any preverbal experiences that might be “no help” scenarios. We identified two. The first was an experience when Kaprena was a toddler, choking on a cookie in her car seat while the family was driving at night. It was uncertain how long she could not breathe before someone realized what was happening.

The second was her birth. Her monitors indicated that her brain was suffocating from lack of oxygen, which led to an emergency C-section. Both of these experiences could easily have been encoded as traumas in Kaprena’s emotional memory; things that would make the brain afraid of “no help” scenarios. Kaprena cried as she heard the details of her birth, suggesting a successful match.

Ever since these two emotion processing experiences, Kaprena has slept much deeper, fallen asleep easier, has had none of the recurrent nightmares, and has had less anxiety overall.

Key points:

-Except in rare circumstances (tumors, some medications/chemicals, brain injury), all emotions come from somewhere, even experiences we cannot remember. 

-It is not necessary to recall the cognitive details of an experience to process the troublesome emotions, though it can be more difficult without them.

-Dreams are made of material already inside the brain, and though we can say little about the meaning of dream content, we can use the emotions of dreams to make significant changes.

*Spiritual implications of dreams are beyond the scope of this post.

See “The Natural Trauma Recovery Process” for more on the science of emotion processing.