Caleb Troxell

April 26, 2015

UWRT 1102-17

The Reality of Nightmares

You and your friends are riding on a boat gliding across the waves. The sun is beating
down on you, warming your skin. The breeze is flowing through your hair. You never thought
your first time on a boat could be so fun. All of the sudden you hit a wave and fly off the boat,
and it continues on leaving you in the vast endless ocean. The sky turns dark, clouds appear and
thunder rumbles. Waves splashing on your face, you begin to struggle. A force beneath the
water pulls you down as you struggle for air. You run out of breath and everything goes black.
Then you wake up and realize it was just a dream. Dreams like this have made me wonder how
accurately dreams portray real life. More specifically, how real do nightmares feel compared to
really experiencing them? It is interesting to feel something in your dream that you have never
actually experienced in life.
Night after night we fall into dreams not knowing what they really could mean. Just
think about a dream you have had recently. Why do you think you had that dream and why did it
stand out to you? Reflecting on your life during sleep can really show your state of mind. All
your worries and desires are shown through your dreams. The question of reality comes up when
you start talking about dreams. Have you ever experienced something in your dream then
experienced it in your life? Have you had a nightmare that ended up into a reality? Did it feel
100% real? Nightmares are interesting to think about. There must be a meaning to them because
why else would you think of them? Nightmares of children are more frequent than adults. Is

this because aged people have experienced fear, sorrow and death in their life. Some say that
people go through so much that nothing will scare them. So could nightmares represent the fear
of fear itself? Sometimes, analyzing a bad dream can help a person see its correlation to their
daytime worries (Melina). Researchers say that nightmares may serve a very beneficial purpose
by making us anxious about potential dangers (Melina). Nightmares are helpful to our survival
or else they probably would have been done away with by evolution, said Deirdre Barrett, a
psychologist at Harvard University. Nightmares can remind you of the dangers that are in the
world, including death.
You could be dreaming right now
Before thinking about how nightmares could impact our life we have to question what
happens during a nightmare. A psychologist, Broughton, researched on how mental activity
reacts to a night terror. This information dives into the scientific aspect of night terror. It regards
what happens to the body when dreaming and why. He talks about physical reaction in your
dreams which could be important when talking about the reality of dreams. This information is
important because the way your brain reacts is important when thinking about the reality of the
dream (Kellerman). A subject often reacts physically to a night terror which doesnt happen
during a normal dream (Kellerman). This might suggest that a night terror could feel more real
than a dream. Does this mean that to the dreamer the night mares feel real? They might not feel
real but they could stand out more than a real dream.
The fact that subjects experience physical arousal supports the reality of the dream.
When experiencing terror in real life your heart rate will increase just as it does in a dream
(Kellerman). This causes your body heat to increase. Have you ever woke up sweating from an
intense dream? This is because your body is reacting to what you think is actually happening.

When dreaming your brain is convincing enough make you think you are actually in reality.
Signals are sent from your brain to the rest of your body to tell your body what is happening.
Some people that practice lucid dreaming can realize that they are dreaming. To accomplish
lucid dreaming you have to write down your dreams and realize common trends (Brogaard). To
facilitate the process you can form the habit of examining the environment or your state of
awareness during the day (Brogaard). Then you must recognize when those trends happen in
your real life. In your dreams things will happen that are irregular and impossible. However, it
is highly difficult to see what is fake when you are dreaming. From person experience, physical
capabilities such as running has changed during a dream. When you dream your brain interprets
extreme weakness in you limbs because your legs are mentally paralyzed during your dream
(Kellerman). This sends a confusing signal to your brain because its saying you arent running
while your mind says you are. Just think, have you ever ran fast in your dream? Recognizing
these faults in behavior can help tell if you are dreaming. Ever since I was aware of lucid
dreaming I have experienced a couple of lucid dreams. Every one of these dreams has happened
because I realized in my dream that I couldnt run. This is my signal as a lucid dreamer. A
signal is your way of identifying that you are in a dream. Mental habits you practice during the
day tend to continue in dreams. So you should examine your environment during the day, then
you may notice that something is different once you start dreaming (Brogaard). Its only when
we wake up, we realize something was strange- Inception. This quote from the popular movie
Inception, shows that when you are a dream you do not notice irregularities. However, once
you wake up you realize how fake it was. Some say when in a lucid dream you can control your
dreams and it feels like it is actually happening. In a dream we enter a world that is completely
are own. In other words: our fears and desires could be exactly represented in our dreams. What

we fear in life will be created by ourselves when we are sound asleep.

Lucid dreams have been

practiced since around 1000 BC but was not accepted by the scientific community until 1978
(Sage). The recorded history of lucid dreaming only supports that fact that it impacts the way we
live and sleep. If this phenomenon was irrelevant than researchers would have forgotten about
the concept thousands of years ago.
Your fears will find you
What do you fear most: snakes, heights, oceans or the act of being murdered? If you fear
something that means you think of it somewhat often. Dreams are a form of wish fulfillment,
and all dreams are related to some underlying wish (Freud). When you dream you will create
things you desire (Freud). So you could conclude that you will create things you fear as well.
Several lucid dream researchers have thought about their lucid nightmares. Lucid nightmares are
when you lose control of a lucid dream and bring your fears present. You can have a bad dream
in which the dreamer is aware but loses the ability to control what is happening. The unconscious
mind can take over and deliver a message to the dreamer in as much emotionally-wrenching
graphic content as it deems necessary to create a lucid nightmare (Kellerman). Fear is not real.
It is the product of thoughts you create. Danger is very real, but fear is a choice. Unknown.
This quote means that fear is optional because you can overcome it. Fear is the factor that turns
dreams into nightmares. During this lucid nightmare you are experiencing great fear but no
danger because you are dreaming. This is why some say that fear can be conquered through
lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is your chance to play around with the extraordinary abilities
buried in unused parts of your brain (Broggard). This is one reason why people practice lucid
dreaming. For example if you are afraid of heights you can test that in your lucid dream. Jump
off buildings climb mountains or go off ski jumps. The act of facing your fears will change the

degree of danger you think it has on your life. When you are scared a signal travels to the
amygdala region of your brain. This produces a chemical called glutamate in another part of our
brain (Kellerman). Another signal triggers our nervous system. This system is responsible for
the fight or flight instinct (Kellerman). This reaction is the cause of heart rate increase and
increase of adrenaline throughout our bodies. In conclusion the fear aspect of a nightmare is
completely accurate but the realistic idea is self-conformed. One day I was talking to my friend
and he said that he had a dream the previous night that he was shot. In this nightmare the killer
chased him down the street, pointed his gun at his head and fired. At this instance an impulse
woke him up in a frantic way. The act of dying from being shot in the head did not wake him up.
It was however the fear of death created by the brain that sent his body an impulse to wake up.
In this dream his brain fully convinced him that he was experiencing a real life situation. This
example shows how the fear of death interacts with your brain while you sleep.
Its called a dream for a reason
Stephen Laberge, a psych physiologist and lucid dream researcher, has worked with
Beverly DUrso to test the limits of lucid dreaming. We can confirm how accurate dreaming is
by observing their lucid dreaming practices. Take one of Beverly D'Ursos dream for example.
She was having a lucid dream at a campsite and she jumped into the campfire. She stood in the
fire played with it and did not get burned or feel pain. In her dream she pushed the limits and
flew to the sun. She got close to the sun and experienced a sense of vibration and a mass amount
of light. This shows how the phenomenology of lucid dreaming is really very different from the
phenomenology of regular experiences (Brogaard). How real do nightmares feel compared to
actually experiencing them? Lets say you have a fear of being burned alive. If this was your
dream and you were put in the fire you would only experience the fear of being burned alive.

The actual feeling you get when being burned alive in this nightmare would not be experienced.
So how scared would you be when facing death? Feeling this fear could be accomplished when
experiencing death in your dream. However, if you were to experience this night after night in
your dreams you would become accustomed to this experience. The act of overcoming this
nightmare will make your nightmares display an inaccurate representation of real life. This
could mean that by practicing lucid dreaming you could overcome the fear of death.
Remembering the difference between fear and danger, your dreams will never display an
accurate representation of death itself.

Works Cited
Brogaard, Berit. "Lucid Dreaming and Self-Realization." Psychology Today. 4 Dec. 2012. Web.
<https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201212/lucid-dreaming-andself-realization>.
"Death and Dying Dreams." Psychic Library beyond Books. 19 Apr. 2012. Web. 25 Feb. 2015.
<http://psychiclibrary.com/beyondBooks/death-and-dying-dreams>.
Freud, Sigmund. On Dreams. New York: Norton, 1952. Print.
Freud, Sigmund, and Joyce Crick. The Interpretation of Dreams. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
Print.
Kellerman, Henry. The Nightmare: Psychological and Biological Foundations. New York:
Columbia UP, 1987. Print.
Melina, Remy. "Why Do We Have Nightmares?" LiveScience. TechMedia Network, 28 July
2010. Web. <http://www.livescience.com/32730-why-do-we-have-nightmares.html>.
Sage, Lucid. "The Future of Lucid Dreaming - Lucid Dreaming." Lucid Dreaming. 9 June 2014.
Web. <http://www.lucidsage.com/the-future-of-lucid-dreaming/>.