January 14, 2025
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Why are recurring dreams bad dreams?
Recurring dreams may involve taking a test that the dreamer did not study for, having to give a speech, or being attacked. Here’s why our sleeping brains keep reminding us of unpleasant dreams

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Why do the same dreams seem to keep chasing us? Maybe you have dreamed of flying like a bird since childhood. Or maybe you’ve recently found yourself revisiting a particular place or time while you’re sleeping. Perhaps you haven’t been a student for decades, but a bad day at work still stirs exam nightmares.
If so, you are never alone. Recurring dreams are a surprisingly common phenomenon. Research shows that up to 75% of adults experience at least one dream in their lifetime. These dreams exist on a spectrum, and can be nearly the same each time, but they can also feature recurring themes, locations, and characters set in different contexts. This fluctuation causes recurring dreams to differ from bad dreams caused by post-traumatic stress disorder, a psychological condition in which a person relives specific memories from their waking life with much less fluctuation during sleep. distinguished. Experts still aren’t sure why we experience recurring dreams, but new research suggests they can better pinpoint the frequency, content, and patterns of scenarios that trigger them. It’s helpful.
Recent research supports the long-held idea that recurring dreams are often, but not always, bad dreams. A 2022 study by Michael Schroedl, head of the sleep laboratory at Germany’s Central Institute for Mental Health, and colleagues found that adults two-thirds of the time reported that their recurring dreams had a “negative tone.” These dreams often deal with themes such as being chased or attacked, arriving somewhere late, or failing at something. In contrast, participants’ recurrent positive dreams included themes such as flying on a plane or discovering a new room in the house.
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It’s not fully understood why we tend to have negative dreams, but Schroedl says dreams are usually an over-dramatization of something in our waking lives. Yes, even if it’s a small emotion or a trivial situation that we feel powerless to change. “In dreams, it’s a bigger emotion, but the connection isn’t always so simple and obvious,” he explains.
Psychology and neuroscience provide further clues. For example, we tend to have what is known as negativity bias. This is the tendency to fixate on unpleasant thoughts, feelings, and social interactions over positive ones. This behavior is rooted in a subconscious desire to resolve negative situations that threaten our survival. Negativity bias may be even worse during sleep because the dreaming brain weakens areas associated with linear logic and activates areas associated with emotion, weakening the filter between thoughts and emotions.
Understanding the psychological underpinnings of recurring dreams has been difficult to study because dreams are difficult to control in experimental situations. But traumatic events that many people experience in common, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the coronavirus pandemic, have allowed scientists to examine specific patterns associated with dreams in more detail. It became.
Deirdre Leigh Barrett, a dream researcher and author of a 2020 book, says people who have experienced a local or global catastrophe experience “alarmingly” repeated dreams with negative undertones afterward. often experience an increase in pandemic dream. During the pandemic, Barrett collected more than 15,000 dream reports, and in two publications of book chapters and research, he found that recurring themes involving fear, illness, and death were more common than they actually were in people’s dreams at the time. were also two to four times more common. Before the pandemic started. Common stories include watching a loved one die, seeing a swarm of insects (perhaps a nod to the description of the coronavirus as a “bug”, according to Barrett), and an all-consuming thing. This included experiencing disasters such as tidal waves, which symbolized the
Barrett found that early in the pandemic, dreams tended to be more literal and cause more fear and anxiety. Over time, they moved on to less scary but still uncomfortable situations associated with social embarrassment, such as being the only person not wearing a mask in public. “They obviously have some link to what’s going on in our daily lives,” Barrett says, referring to the so-called “continuity hypothesis.” “If you haven’t processed your emotions during the day, your nighttime consciousness will try to process them at night,” she explains.
Barrett and other experts emphasize that recurring negative dreams are common and normal, and there are actionable steps to control them. Some people have had success with a practice called image rehearsal therapy, in which they replay their nightmares with happy endings before going to bed. Nirit Sofa-Dudek, a consciousness researcher and clinical psychologist at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, Israel, also recommends cultivating good sleep hygiene. By setting a consistent sleep schedule, limiting screen use, and avoiding caffeine or alcohol before bed, “you’re less likely to fall asleep with heightened emotions,” she says. . “The best advice I can give is to try to set firm boundaries between when you wake up and when you sleep so you don’t bring anxiety into your dreams.”