Dr. Alok 'Dr. K' Kanojia

So nightmares, the whole point of a nightmare is that it's like terrifying, right?

So now I want y'all to understand this for a moment.

If a nightmare is terrifying, which part of your brain does that terror come from?

It comes from the amygdala.

Like we, that's when it turns on, we feel fear.

That's, it's like one to one, literally the point.

So there's a good chance that the reason that we dream and the reason that we have nightmares is to process our emotions.

And in order for us to process our emotions, they have to be, they can't be in read-only mode.

They have to be in edit mode.

We have to work through them.

And one of the ways that we do that is through nightmares.

So as a clinician, when I have a patient who has a lot of nightmares, as we work through their nightmares, their emotional state gets better during the day.

And as their emotional state, if we work on their anxiety during the day, the nightmares decrease at night.

Okay, this is why Freud and Jung were so into dreams.

Memories, Dreams, and Reflections by Carl Jung.

So back in the day when we had these like psychoanalysts and they started like discovering emotions...

They figured out really early on, they stumbled into this idea that the dreams we have correlate with the emotions that we experience.

And one of the ways that our brain deals with emotions is through dreaming.

Okay?

So amygdala becomes hyperactive, therefore anxiety is going to increase.