"Sweet dreams...," people wish warmly to one another before drifting off. For many, however, those words are contradictory. If you experience nightmares, dreams are anything but sweet, and may cause sweating, tossing and turning, and a severe dread of sleep. Nightmares are the most common type of sleep disturbance in adulthood. The problem may be as simple as an occasional annoying dream, or it may be a persistent, devastating nocturnal event.
Some people swear they never dream. But they do. Every single night your brain concocts elaborate plots that are sometimes meaningful, sometimes nonsensical. Your dream plots may fade to the point that, upon awakening, you are unaware you were even dreaming. It is estimated that dreams occur approximately 80% of the time you are in the stage of sleep called rapid eye movement, or REM sleep. REM sleep, so called because the eye rapidly shifts back and forth and up and down during this phase of sleep, occurs about once every 90 minutes in the sleep cycle throughout the night. REM lasts anywhere from 10 to 50 minutes, and there are typically four to six REM periods in a night. That leaves you ample time for dreaming!
REM periods also lengthen as the night wears on, which probably explains why
your dreams appear to be so much more vivid and numerous just before you wake up. Dreaming can also occur during the other stages of the sleep cycle, stages 1 through 4, also known as non-REM or NREM sleep. However, these dreams are reported to be more general and vague in nature, with less action and fewer identifiable characters and objects. This probably accounts for the fact that REM dreams are more clearly remembered.
If you dread going to sleep because you fear the return of a bad dream, you will benefit from becoming familiar with and desensitized to your dreams. Using the techniques outlined in this chapter, you can actually gain control over your dreams. You can learn to escape nightmares in the earliest stages and even turn them into learning experiences. Once you have mastered the principles of "lucid dreaming," your dreams can help you unravel daily hassles and deep anxieties that may be contributing to your nightmares.
