In the familiar house of an old ranching property I've visited for more than a quarter-century, I felt that something was off. My hackles were raised and I sensed an intense danger. I ran into a room and slammed the heavy door shut. I know this door: it's tricky to lock, so I examined the crack between door and frame, lifting the bottom slightly so that I can see the mechanics as they click into place. Deadbolt slides smoothly, and I take my first deep breath. The handle shakes violently and the door shudders as someone throws themselves at it.
I know who's on the other side. It's a balding, middle-aged man. The remaining thin hair splashes across his head and around his temples, reflecting his own unpredictable, intemperate behavior. He's dangerous and he wants to kill me.
I back away from the door and wince as the old wood floor creaks. He still fiddles with the doorknob, but it's getting quieter. A chill sneaks through my nervous system when I realize what room I'm in: the mudroom / sunroom that connects to the garage. That means there's another door I've neglected. I turn around and sneak over to that door, locking and pulling the chain up and into its slot. Now I can breathe this time. I'm safe.
Turning back to the original door, I take a few quiet steps. It's not quiet enough now that the doorknob has been still—I hadn't noticed the silence in my panic to secure the back door. My eyes lock onto the dull, wide-eyed gaze of the man from under the crack. He had laid down on the floor and watched me this whole time.
Panic creeps back in. The space between the floor and the bottom of the door grows larger until I can see his whole face. He can fit under the door—and he smiles wide as I realize this. I have a heavy blue and white vase in my hands and I prepare to slam it on his head as he crawls toward me.
"Are you ok?"
I wake up completely confused and scared. I don't trust what I am seeing. It seems to be my room as I left it last night—but I was just in a room that felt familiar and correct, despite it being completely incorrect to reality's architecture.
Trying to calm myself and detangle reality from imagination, I get one last total-body chill of fear despite being in actual safety. The mere memory of my dream taking its final toll for my nighttime travels.
Nightmare Science?
Nightmares such as the one I described above have haunted me for the last few years—not necessarily in frequency, but in intensity. Prior to the 2020 pandemic, I don't recall very many times where I would remember my dreams at all, let alone be awoken whimpering in fear or fighting for my life to escape from some terrific threat.
If something like a nightmare can be that intense, does it mean something?
I was surprised to find relatively little useful material for understanding nightmares outside of a diagnosis or condition linked to nightmares. In the abstract of the study, "Nightmares in the general population" (2017), it backs me up a little bit, saying: "Nightmares are inherently distressing, prevent restorative sleep, and are associated with a number of psychiatric problems, but have rarely been the subject of empirical study."
From the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Bible, it seems like we humans have pretty consistently considered dreams in some kind of supernatural terms. We either have some kind of prophecy framework to interpret them through (e.g. my dream is an omen about the future), or we have a Freudian interpretation framework that still relies heavily on symbolism and subjectivity.
Dr. Ernest Jones made this observation about nightmares:
"It is not often realised that most descriptions of Nightmare given by its victims are an inarticulate and feeble echo of the dread reality. This is one result of the general human tendency to shun deep emotions whenever possible, leading to an imperfect appreciation of the intensity of mental suffering." —On the Nightmare (1959), by Ernest Jones, M.D., pg 13-14
...although the rest of the book explores how medieval monsters (werewolves, vampires, hags, etc.) may have some bearing on how we understand nightmares. His pragmatic insight on our discomfort with deep emotions is still ultimately linked to the supernatural, even if only by the lay-person's conceptualizations, superstitions, and religious influences.
I was able to find an intriguing non-Freudian proposal from Henry Kellerman about when nightmares occur:
"The nightmare is triggered only if a specific emotion-defense is impaired along with an impairment of some disorganization to dreamwork mechanisms so that these mechanisms are inoperative. In such a case the emotion is disregulated, while the primary-process material of a latent dream is similarly unregulated. Under such conditions, the highest intensity of the emotion is experienced, and the dreamer awakens." —The Nightmare: Psychological and Biological Foundations (1987), edited by Henry Kellerman, pg 279
Ok, so we still have a bunch of jargon that basically says the same thing: nightmares are intense, we find them alongside our deepest emotions, and we can't escape the strangeness or "supernatural" structures that come with all dreams.
Maybe that's actually kind of cool because, as we've seen from the development of technology, supernatural themes like religion, monstrosity, and other anxiety-inducing metaphors emerge just like what I'm finding with dreams. Of course, please consult with your mental health professional if you are experiencing distress whether because of nightmares or any other causes. I'm no expert here, but I am seeing some interesting threads to pull for exploration's sake—not dismissing the science that is out there in any way!
Embracing the Weirdness
There seems to be a fine line to walk when trying to understand dreams. I see two extremes: dismissal and over-belief. On the dismissal side, perhaps we assign no value to dreams at all. It's just the brain doing its thing and as long as all of the other aspects of mental health are being cared for, it's just what happens sometimes. Over-belief on the other side assigns so much value to the dreams that we may be open to manipulation or scams, or we think that we have some kind of special power or knowledge that comes packaged in a puzzle that we have to figure out. I want to stay away from both of these extreme sides.
What I would like to explore is how to apply some Freudian and literary analysis techniques to try and uncover what is useful to me in understanding nightmares. Instead of looking for divine or supernatural (external) meaning, I'm looking for personal (internal) meaning.
So here are a few techniques that might be useful:
- Identify possible symbols (objects, people, or the setting)
- Identify possible themes (rejection, survival, other story elements)
- Consider the context of reality (what has happened to you recently?)
- Consider what things or people in the dream are actually placeholders for something or someone else (Freud would say nothing in the dream is literal)
- Free-associate to find out what these things might actually represent (when I think of XYZ person or object, what comes to mind?)
For example, if we take the nightmare I described, there are a few things that stick out to me:
- Feeling threatened in what is normally a safe, familiar space
- Taking precautions
- Acting to defend myself when the precautions fail
There are many things in the real world that could explain how these symbols took shape in my sleeping brain. Maybe I feel like my community is not as safe for me as a queer person as I once thought is was. Maybe the stresses at work have suddenly spiked. Maybe the political environment has become so hostile and unrecognizable that I feel powerless and trapped. Maybe all of these things simultaneously generated the scene.
Ultimately the nightmare, in my opinion, can be used as a tool for me to start to unpack what my stressors are. For me, I have a really difficult time identifying when I am stressed. It's always after it explodes with anger or snappiness or feeling extreme sadness that finally clues me in. Nightmares might be my brain's way of signaling to me that I'm stressed out and I need to take care of myself.
In a way, this is also a helpful exercise in approaching other concepts that are difficult to understand, such as AI. I heard from a coworker that AI-generated videos were like dreams: interesting to the creator only. Maybe that's one way to start unpacking the flood of generated content that is coming: we now have dream-like content that is neither totally meaningless, but neither is it accurate or truthful.
Scoping this to the more innocuous genres of content (political, scientific, current-event, and historical content needs extra scrutiny and is not compatible with this thought), when we start seeing "artistic" AI videos, we can look for signs that the content is thoughtful, and if it is not, we can dismiss it as easily as we do someone else's dream.
Social media is already filled with disingenuous AI content. For example, you may have seen one of many videos where animals are jumping on trampolines as though someone's backyard camera happened to catch something funny. There's also the disturbing AI videos that a certain political leader likes to make in his free time—and if those are a manifestation of his dreams, then we have an entirely different problem, but that's also out of scope for today.
For me, I will be having a lot less FOMO when it comes to general social media, because it will largely be other people's "dreams" that they are enamored with simply because their AI hallucinated something from their prompt. Everything else will require deep analysis to discern authenticity and factuality.
Cyborg
I didn’t find what I was looking for as I researched nightmares. I was hoping to find something in science that could console me or explain why I have developed these intense experiences somewhat recently (specifically, I was looking for some kind of social dynamic like marginalization as being a cause, or something I could see myself in). What I found instead were principles for understanding difficult and stressful things.
Meaning is always created in your own mind—there is no Meaning that exists as a separate entity that we have to track down and catch. That's actually comforting to me. It takes the pressure off of putting together a cosmic puzzle with my mortal mind, and instead allows me to choose to engage or not. My dreams and nightmares can be a tool for insight into my underlying stress, with storylines that I can use to consider what is impacting me in real life.
While dealing with AI-generated content is going to be a particularly difficult skill in itself, we touched upon a possible tool to add to the toolkit. There may be ways to push this further, because we will all be forced to interact and engage with AI content indefinitely.
For now, take care of yourself mentally, emotionally, and physically.