Abnormal Psychology

Dreams can affect the way people interact with others. Dreams can be said to make the brain see them as a memory. If you see someone while awake that was in a previous nightmare, your brain is going to see them as a threat or trigger fear. Psychology Today says that some common symptoms from nightmares are, “being oriented and alert instantly upon awakening and repeatedly waking up with detailed recollection of long, frightening dreams that center around threats to survival, security, or physical integrity and usually occur in the second half of the sleep or nap period (nightmares).” Patrick McNamara explains that when the night progresses, the activation patterns intensify and can color a person’s mood for the day upon awakening. When people …show more content…
Children have less control of their emotional states, and when experiencing a lack of sleep and a fearful memory they cannot get rid of, their moods are going to be a little more agitated than that of an adult who can control their emotions more easily. Dreams can affect the limbic and paralimbic systems in the brain which get activated at higher levels of REM. This was seen in patients who are diagnosed with depression. These patients are also known to have higher levels when they make rational decisions or thoughts. This is found to affect their emotions of depression because they never catch a break from the pain they are feeling. Their memories of dreams are seeing fear and terror which makes them feel a constant discomfort in life. When someone sleeps, their mind is in a continuous active state (Popova). It reviews experiences from the day before and processes through the important stuff to save memories. Dreams come from this process because your brain flashes these moments at you from pattern recognition (Popova). Sleep researcher, Rosalind D. Cartwright, proposes …show more content…
It has been said that bad dreams work in a way that can act as an emotional release, allowing people to process through their anxieties that occur out of their everyday lives (Riesman). This is a process that actually can help a person’s mental health. The brain takes things that have been worrying a person and turns the worries into stories, the nightmare. When that person wakes up they remember the dream as if it was a memory (Riesman). Since this memory is placed in the brain, a person will then think of it as something that occurred in the past, making it easier to let go of because you already experienced it. This helps people get distance from their anxieties due to the fact they “already experienced it (Riesman).” Even though dreams make a person feel scared, anxious, or trapped, these dreams can actually help them in their daytime lives. Bad dreams do not happen only to the people who experience anxiety during the day. Bad dreams can occur from simple things like eating before bed or watching a scary movie. Nightmares can cause extreme emotions in a person to arise. There are many different ways to go about interpreting dreams, but in the end, a person experiences the dream based off of the way they are feeling about the world that day. Positivity and distress mechanisms can help a person experience less nightmares in their life. There is no way of