Post-traumatic dreams

Night terrors are pure emotional experiences that occur on awakening from sleep. Typically, they are associated with non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, as are the recurrent dreams of post-traumatic stress. Together with the arousal from NREM sleep, there is intense activation of the heart, the breathing rate increases, and the blood pressure may rise to extremely high levels the person awakens drenched in sweat and terrified, and often has little dream recall whatsoever from these awakenings. 

What effect does trauma have on dreams There are two paradoxically contradictory answers to this question enormous impact and very little. We don t understand why, in some cases, the trauma is almost always dominant and, in others, it has such a small role to play in the shaping of dreams. One answer may be that victims of trauma, e.g. post-traumatic stress disorder patients who have had violent experiences in war, have a specific kind of awakening experience. Their sleep is interrupted by terrors akin to the night terrors of children, and, like in the night terrors of children, these do not occur in REM sleep when normal dreaming takes place. Instead, they occur in NREM sleep, the phase of sleep in which the brain is less completely activated, but in which powerful emotions can nevertheless make themselves felt. 

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