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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Future Proof Extra with Jonathan McRae. Proudly supported by Research Ireland on Newstalk.
I think we can agree that nightmares are not very desirable, but you may not be aware that they're also quite bad for your health. So how can we cure somebody of something that isn't really happening except inside their head? Well, Michelle Carr is the director of the Dream Engineering Lab at Montreal Centre for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine.
She's author of Into the Dream Lab, The New Science of Dreams and Nightmares. She joined me now. Welcome to the program, Michelle.
Chapter 2: What are the health impacts of nightmares?
We actually very recently kind of touched on lucid dreaming. And so I really want to focus in this piece on nightmares, because I suppose when it happens to people, a nightmare can actually both be traumatic within the dream, but they can often recur. Do we know anything about nightmares as opposed to dreams and why they can actually revisit people over and over again? Yeah.
So nightmares very often tend to have recurring themes and they can be traumatic, as you said, in people who have experienced trauma or any kind of adversity or significant stress in their life. incorporates elements of that event from their life, potentially replaying a trauma that someone has experienced, or it can be more symbolically related to a stressful event someone's experienced.
So an example might be someone who has recurring tidal wave dreams where they feel like they're completely overwhelmed and helpless in the face of this natural disaster. And the dream is not literally representing any kind of waking life stress, but it's emotionally representing how someone is feeling.
And these nightmares can recur on a weekly basis, really interfering with sleep and causing a lot of emotional distress on awakening as well and kind of dragging on throughout the day and interfering with life in that way. That all sounds very plausible, but is there anything, I mean, because there are people out there who read horoscopes, who read tea leaves and so on.
Is there any good evidence to explain what's actually causing a nightmare and that what's physically happening in a dream or what's happening in a nightmare is actually representation of the struggles people are going through.
Because I kind of feel like there's a bit of soft gray area there where, you know, I could have a nightmare and I could attribute it to anything bad that happened to me that day. I'm just wondering what evidence we have that our nightmares are reflecting what's going on in our real life in a more vivid way. Yeah, I mean, it ties into dream science more generally.
We do know that dreams are very frequently incorporating little bits of memory from recent life. And we can see these memory traces from the past day or from the past week getting incorporated into dreams. And with nightmares, we might see somebody say they go through a stressful event, like their parents get divorced or something, and then suddenly they start experiencing this nightmare.
So, I mean, is there evidence to suggest that if someone has gone through a traumatic event, they're more likely to have nightmares? Because I was thinking myself, right? I'm a big horror fan. I like to watch horror films. I never get a nightmare as a result of those. But when I saw Nightmare on Elm Street for the first time, I did. And I guess one was a proper visceral fear that I had as a child.
Right. And now I'm not really scared. So I'm wondering, you know, is there solid evidence to suggest that if you are experiencing something traumatic that you're more likely to have a negative dream? Oh, yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, there's very strong links between experiencing trauma and developing post-traumatic nightmares or even experiencing low levels of adversity.
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Chapter 3: How do nightmares differ from regular dreams?
They sleep in the bedrooms in our lab. We hook them up to electrodes and kind of keep track of their brain activity and bodily activity while they're sleeping. And we're basically watching them from another room and we wake them up and collect dream reports.
Sometimes we invite people who have nightmares or PTSD into the lab to specifically study how their dreams might differ from other healthy subjects.
And when you see these people who are having nightmares, when you're having a nightmare, you feel like you're, you know, it's often your activity, your physical activity, you feel like it's very high, like you're jerking around or you're running or whatever. It feels, when you're having a nightmare, that... your body must be doing a lot of work.
And I guess seeing someone have a nightmare, is that typically the case that the body, the physical body is jerking around a lot? Why would that be? Right. Yeah. Normally during REM sleep, our body is actually pretty good at kind of suppressing any sort of physical movements and trying to keep us relatively still and calm during REM sleep, even while we're having these vivid dreams.
But there is research showing that people who have nightmares, they have In general, a more aroused REM sleep, but particularly at the end of a nightmare, you might see some increases in heart rate or respiration rate, maybe some increase, we see like muscle twitches in the body, like their body is more active potentially. And so this stress in dream,
can also relate to the body in real life, right? Like the Nightmare on Elm Street film is all about, you know, the crossover between reality and the dream world. And in the case of stress that you experience in a dream, that's still physical stress to the body. Is that right? We think so, yeah. And it's physical stress that can kind of, first of all, linger just after awakening.
I mean, it's often very hard to calm yourself down after having a nightmare. People want to get out of bed and really shake off the feeling because it really lingers physically. But we also see spikes in stress hormones after a nightmare and anxiety. you know, differences in how someone physically feels, their energy levels, the day following a nightmare.
So there's potentially all sorts of physical effects downstream from experiencing a nightmare. And we know that sort of level of stress regularly happening is not good for the body, right? I mean, can you identify, you know, through increased stress or cortisone or whatever, someone who might be, you know, a regular nightmare sufferer? I don't think we're there yet.
I think we're just starting to really understand this link between nightmares and physical health. It's rather new, you know, that nightmares are being taken so seriously for how consequential they can be on not just mental health, but physical health and sleep health as well. Yeah.
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