According to scientists, having repetitive dreams is a sign that the unconscious is warning us to avoid a situation. When something is wrong with us, the unconscious alerts us through dreams. If we don’t pay attention or don’t understand his message, he will send us more dreams, portraying the same message. It can be with different scenarios, people and circumstances, although the plot is the same. If it doesn’t work, it crashes for several nights. at same key. And this is already capable of leaving us stranded. “Why did I dream about this again?”, we often think.
However, if the brain persists in not capturing the message of the repeated dream, then the unconscious conjures up saturated dreams with a greater dramatic content, as a strategy to be really attended to. “And it presents us with a nightmare,” explains German psychotherapist Marie-Louise von Franz in her book The Path of Dreams. Just as we are impacted by seeing a very grotesque, violent or radical scene in a movie, the nightmare has this effect.
Very intense traumas, such as robberies, accidents and wars, can trigger repetitive dreams in which these events are relived, and from which people wake up depressed, anxious, with sweating and tachycardia. This is one of the symptoms of a disease that psychiatry today calls Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which affects between 15% and 20% of people who have witnessed life-threatening situations.
Although the nightmare does not always appear at sequence of the repetition of the same dream, it is worth paying attention when one of them appears. There is no standard recipe for interpreting them. Each case is different. The important thing is to focus at metaphorical language. In some cases, the character of urgency is great, and it is convenient to awaken to a more conscious and responsible attitude towards a certain area, relationship or life situation.
Dreams also play a prominent role at Depression: Neurologists have found that the condition improves when REM sleep is suppressed through medication, although they cannot explain why this happens. Certain organic changes in the REM phase are also attributed to the emotional content of dreams, such as changes in heart rate, breathing and blood pressure.
SOURCES Andre L. Souza, professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Alabama, and Marco Antonio Spinelli, Master in Psychiatry at the Faculty of Medicine at USP