Brain turns listening inward during REM sleep, EEG recordings suggest
medicalxpress.com
medicalxpress.com
The link to the study is at the bottom of the article. It is Open Access as well.
Some part of your mind is always listening.
Most of this seems pretty common knowledge
When you are awake: Your executive function is active, your default mode network (a network of brain areas which light up together which are focused on social interaction + long term memory) is active, your amygdala (threat) is active (at a high level if you are stressed, but has some base level of activity even when not), the "fight or flight" neurotransmitter norepinephrine is also circulating at a reasonable level (again, higher if you're stressed).
During REM sleep: Your executive functions are disabled, your default mode network is extremely active, your amygdala is inactive, and norepinephrine is 85% below base waking levels.
So... even though you might be having a scary dream, your brain is actually in a supremely relaxed state. You are also in a state where you cannot control your behaviour (no executive functioning; I am excluding lucid dreams from this statement).
Why is this useful?
[I am training to be a Attachment-based psychotherapist, the following is learnt from my training + dealing with my own issues in therapy + a substantive evidence base:]
The primary driver of unnecessary adult psychological suffering comes from a miscalibrated fear response. When we are infants we are highly sensitive to the emotional connection between us and our caregivers, and will be scared when our parents become anxious. Unfortunately, our parent’s anxieties are not always rational (just like ours eventually will not be), and they are frequently triggered by what are natural expressions of emotion the infant will (and should) express. Some overly simplistic examples might be a “tough father” who is angry when their child shows weakness, or an “anxious mother” who is scared in case the natural exuberance of their child may offend someone. Infants pick up on this fear response and develop a fear about expressing the emotion which generates the fear response in their parent.
This all happens unconsciously. The infant does not decide to do this. The infant is not aware that it is doing this. The infant does not have the cognitive capacity to understand that it is doing this. Then the infant grows up, but this deep fear has not left. This adult is then stuck with the side effects. That fear of appearing weak persists; that fear of upsetting others persists. For most of us, we are not even conscious of these fears as adults, but these fears will have a powerful effect on our behaviours.
The mind is quite like a pressure based physics system. Bad mental health emerges when the system cannot release pressure, good mental health is associated with quick releases of pressure. You will have a more stressful internal world if you can’t allow yourself to be weak and cry; you will have a more tense experience of life if you’re worried that everything you do might upset someone. Both of these are blockages in the flow of natural healthy emotional expression.
Mental health gets better if you can unblock these blockages. But remember… you’re not aware you even have them. This is where dreams help. Dreams are effectively the inverse of anxious mind wandering.
Anxious mind wandering: You are awake, the brain is in a stressed state: you worry about the worst things that could happen. Objectively, these things are normally far fetched, but unfortunately it doesn’t feel like that on the inside.
Dreaming: You are asleep, the brain is in a relaxed state: the brain creates situations where it would be healthy/useful to not be so scared. And the brain turns off your executive functioning, but not your default mode network, so any behaviour with observe you take in the dream reveals the state of your emotional/long-term-memory/relational brain. When you focus on the behaviour of the dreamer, you will notice the behaviour will be miscalibrated to the situation they are dreaming about - and in the direction of revealing too much fear.
Examples from real dreams: Someone is mugged by a child robber, and hands over all their stuff without fighting back. Someone is getting a tattoo they don’t want, but lets the tattooing continue instead of saying “stop!”.
This allows the analyser of the dream (a therapist or perhaps yourself) to pinpoint the underlying fear that must be dealt with to unblock the system of emotional expression.
(This note was a bit rushed... so sorry if it is written casually.)
I wrote a paper about this. Preprint here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/k6trz_v1
Previously discussed on hacker news here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590
Every few years I experience a recurring nightmare, where I am being chased by some kind of giant monster, but I've never gotten a look at what it is and I don't know specifically what it wants but always just assume it wants to do me harm. After a long time running from it and panicking, eventually I realize no matter how hard I try to run, it's futile - the monster will catch me eventually. So I just decide to accept there's no way out and give up. Either I jump off a cliff to go ahead and kill myself (in which case I always wake up before hitting the ground), or I just stop, sit down, and begin to turn around so I can finally get a look at the monster before it catches me (in which case I always wake up before it gets me, AND before I can see it).
I have scary dreams sometimes, but this is the only one I'd classify as a real nightmare. Nevertheless, I find myself waiting for the nightmare to come again, because I really just want to finally get a look at what it is that's chasing me.
Sometimes I wonder if, when I finally get to see it, I'll somehow be changed as a person.
Is there anything else going on in the dream? Other people you are with/could be with/what kind of location/can you fight this thing or are you sure it will get you?
I was having the free fall "nightmare" once in a while and i was on my bike falling free. But. Every time i touched the ground i kept going on them wheels no problem. Then it hit me, once in a while i had been playing this game on my phone Hill Climb, where i found myself with the motorbike on the moon which is a great way to farm gold coins. There is a lot of falling down on that map.
Since i had this revelation many years ago i started to "decipher" most of my dreams.
Makes me feel life is now a bit more boring though.
That this nightmare has never been fully resolved could be why it reoccurs.
I would guess when you see the monster it will stop, but depends what the monster is potentially standing in for. What you could consider is what triggers it - is there something during the preceding waking hours that causes you to revisit that dream?