Why do you have nightmares and other unpleasant dreams?

Humans spend a third of their lives sleeping, which is quite a lot, right? Dreams and their meaning have long intrigued people. Experts dealing with sleep and dreams, they still don't quite know the real reason for the emergence of dreams, but there are quite a few hypotheses. Thanks to the development of technology, psychologists and other experts have begun to study the brain's activities during sleep, and thus the curtains of the unknown are slowly being lifted.

It is the dream of every individual unique, because everyone experiences different emotions and events that happen throughout the day in their own way. When we fall asleep, our brain continues to work hard, sorting events into short-term and long-term memory. They compare events that happened recently and those that happened some time ago. That's why we can look at our memories in our minds, say from childhood. It all happens during the rapid eye movement (REM) phase, which lasts 10 to 20 minutes and repeats 3 to 5 times throughout the night. This phase is called "paradoxical sleep", and then it unfolds most dreams and during that time of sleep our brain emits the same waves as when we are awake. It often happens that we wake up in the morning with the awareness that we had a dream, but we cannot remember the dream.

Why do we have nightmares?

What about nightmares? Why do we dream of apocalypses and zombies chasing us and many other unpleasant scenarios? Swiss and American scientists conducted attempt, during which they managed to find the answer to these questions. According to them, it is a species nervous system training, which helps a person to manage negative emotions in real life. They say that we the emotions we feel in our dreams help to resolve emotional pressure and prepare us for future possible stress loads.

Using an electroencephalograph, they studied the functioning of different parts of the brain during sleep. 18 volunteers were woken up several times during the night and asked what they were dreaming about and whether these dreams were nightmares. Based on their responses and analysis of brain activity, the researchers identified two areas in the brain responsible for nightmares. That's them insula and midbrain cortex. In dreams, these two parts of the brain interact they activate in the same situations as in real life, when we feel anxious or afraid. The insula is responsible for evaluating emotions and is automatically activated as soon as a person feels anxiety. The human middle cerebral cortex prepare for an appropriate response during the occurrence of a threat and controls how a person behaves when in danger.

Here are some more interesting facts about sleep and dreams

• A person will live 3 minutes without air, 3 days without water and 3 weeks without food and 11 days without sleep.
• Up to 15 percent of people in the world walk in their sleep. Not only can they sit on the bed or walk around the room, but they can also leave the house while sleeping.
• The belief that menstruators should not wake up is said to be a myth. In many cases, this is actually necessary. Menstruation can last from a few minutes to half an hour.
• People who don't get enough sleep have an increased appetite when their leptin (hormone that regulates appetite) drops.
• In the first 5 minutes after waking up, we forget 50 percent of our dreams. After 5 extra minutes, we forget almost everything we saw in the dream.
• Sigmund Freud said that dreams are forms of wish fulfillment and thus the unconscious attempts of man to resolve various types of conflicts or problems, either current or arising from his past.