Nightmares & Interpretations
One of the questions clients ask me surprisingly often is, "Why am I having nightmares?" They sometimes ask it rather quietly, almost as if a frightening dream is something they should feel embarrassed about. It isn't. Nightmares are an extraordinarily common part of being human. Most of us, whatever our age or background, know what it is like to wake suddenly from a dream with our heart racing and the feeling of fear still very much present. As an art therapist, and as someone who has spent many years interested in dreams and their symbolism, I've become reluctant to think of nightmares simply as unwanted intrusions. They can certainly be distressing, but sometimes they seem to be the mind's rather dramatic way of drawing our attention to something that hasn't found another means of expression.
People haven't always understood nightmares in this way. Throughout history, frightening dreams have been interpreted as warnings, messages from gods, encounters with spirits and even glimpses of events yet to happen. The Ancient Egyptians recorded and interpreted dreams, while in the Greek world people visited healing sanctuaries associated with Asclepius, where dreaming formed part of religious and healing practices. Medieval Europeans sometimes attributed disturbing dreams to supernatural forces or spiritual temptation. Psychology offers rather different explanations today, looking instead at emotion, memory, stress, trauma and our individual experiences. The explanations may have changed enormously, but one thing hasn't: nightmares command our attention because the emotions we experience within them can feel completely real.
The Importance of Context For Interpreting Nightmares
When I'm discussing a nightmare with somebody, I'm usually interested in what is happening in their waking life before I become too interested in individual symbols. Nightmares rarely exist in isolation. They often become more noticeable during periods of stress, grief, illness, uncertainty or significant change. Sometimes the connection seems fairly obvious. Someone going through a difficult divorce might repeatedly dream about being lost. A person caring for an ageing parent might dream about buildings collapsing or familiar roads suddenly disappearing. At other times, the connection is far less apparent. Dreams don't always reproduce our problems literally. More often, they seem to translate them into images and metaphors.
Being chased is probably one of the best-known examples. The pursuer might be a stranger, an animal, a shadowy figure or something we never actually see. The instinctive interpretation is that the dream concerns whatever is chasing us, but I often find the more interesting question is what we're running from. Is there a difficult conversation we've been avoiding? A decision we don't want to make? An emotion we'd rather not acknowledge? In art therapy, I sometimes invite someone to draw whatever was pursuing them. Something interesting can happen when the frightening figure is taken out of the dream and placed on a sheet of paper. It becomes something that can be looked at, changed and perhaps even understood.
Falling In Dreams
Falling is another experience that appears again and again in nightmares. These dreams can feel remarkably physical, and it's not unusual to wake suddenly with a racing heart or the sensation that you've actually dropped. Falling naturally lends itself to ideas about instability and losing control. Someone starting a new career, dealing with financial uncertainty or coming to the end of a long relationship may feel as though the ground beneath them isn't quite as dependable as it once was. A falling dream doesn't have to be a prediction of failure. It may simply be a wonderfully economical image for the vulnerability that accompanies change.
Then there are dreams about teeth falling out. I've heard so many variations of this dream over the years that it's easy to understand why it has become almost legendary in discussions of dream symbolism. Suggested meanings range from anxiety about appearance and ageing to difficulties with communication or confidence. Sometimes it appears during periods of transition when an old sense of identity is changing. But I would be very wary of declaring that losing teeth in a dream always means one particular thing. What was happening in the dream? How did you feel about losing them? What is happening in your life now? Those details matter much more to me than a definition in a dream dictionary.
Dreams involving death can be especially upsetting. Someone may dream that they have died, or that a partner, parent, child or friend has died, and wake genuinely frightened that the dream means something terrible is going to happen. Symbolically, however, death can be an extraordinarily rich image. It can represent an ending, a transformation or the recognition that something in our lives is no longer what it once was. Jung's approach to dreams was psychological rather than prophetic, and I find that distinction useful. The death of the dreamer might represent the ending of one identity or stage of life. Dreaming about another person's death might reflect a relationship that is changing rather than a literal event.
Modern Psychology & Trauma-Related Nightmares
There is an important distinction to make when we talk about nightmares associated with trauma. People who have experienced combat, assault, serious accidents, disasters or other traumatic events can experience recurring nightmares that reproduce elements of what actually happened. Nightmares are a recognised symptom associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and these experiences shouldn't simply be treated as puzzles requiring symbolic interpretation. There are established therapeutic approaches used for trauma and trauma-related sleep problems, including Imagery Rehearsal Therapy (IRT), Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia (CBT-I) and, in appropriate circumstances, Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR). When nightmares are persistent, connected with trauma or seriously affecting someone's ability to sleep and function during the day, professional support is far more appropriate than relying upon dream interpretation alone.
Art therapy can provide another way of approaching frightening dream material. It doesn't require someone to sit down and intellectually decode every object that appeared during the night. Instead, we can work with the image itself. What colour was the darkness? How large was the figure? What would happen if the locked door were opened? A terrifying shadow can feel different once it has been painted. A wall can acquire a doorway. Something that seemed enormous in the dream can be made smaller on the page. The creative process doesn't erase what happened, but it can change our relationship with the imagery.
This is one reason I'm cautious about universal interpretations. Symbols are intensely personal. A snake is a good example. One person may immediately associate snakes with danger because of a frightening childhood encounter. Someone else may think of transformation because a snake sheds its skin. Another person might associate it with medicine and healing. The ocean can represent peace to somebody who grew up beside it and terror to somebody who nearly drowned. Before asking what a symbol is "supposed" to mean, I prefer to ask what it means to the person who actually dreamed it.
Children's nightmares need particular sensitivity. Children often have extraordinarily vivid dreams, and monsters, threatening animals, dark rooms and frightening imaginary creatures can accompany perfectly normal stages of development. Reassurance and a predictable bedtime routine can help, and drawing the monster or talking about the dream can sometimes make it feel less powerful. Persistent nightmares that cause substantial distress during the day deserve more attention, particularly when there is reason to suspect bullying, trauma or another serious source of anxiety. In those circumstances, parents may want to discuss the situation with an appropriately qualified healthcare professional.
Our scientific understanding of dreaming has also changed considerably. Vivid dreams are strongly associated with rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, although dreaming isn't confined exclusively to REM. There is still no single agreed explanation for why we dream. Researchers have explored possible relationships with memory, learning, emotion and the processing of experiences. One particularly interesting idea is that dreaming may provide the brain with an opportunity to work with emotionally significant material while we sleep. That doesn't mean every frightening dream contains a coded psychological message, but it does offer another reason why difficult experiences from waking life might find their way into our dreams.
Stress certainly seems to matter. I notice that people often report more disturbing or unusually vivid dreams when life becomes unsettled, and poor sleep can become part of the same cycle. Basic sleep habits shouldn't be overlooked. Keeping reasonably consistent sleeping hours, finding ways to manage stress, exercising regularly, and being thoughtful about alcohol and other things that disrupt sleep can make a difference for many people. None of these guarantees a peaceful night, of course, but sometimes improving the circumstances surrounding sleep is more useful than endlessly analysing what happened during it.
When a nightmare does seem worth exploring symbolically, I encourage curiosity before interpretation. Instead of beginning with, "Why did I have this horrible dream?" try asking, "What was I actually feeling?" Fear may be the obvious answer, but perhaps underneath it was helplessness, embarrassment, anger, loneliness or a feeling of being trapped. Once we identify the emotion, the dream can begin to look different. I sometimes think of a nightmare as an urgent letter from somewhere within ourselves. We don't necessarily have to agree with its contents, but it may be worth opening the envelope.
A dream journal can be extremely useful here. Keep it beside the bed and write things down before the details disappear. Don't worry about producing a coherent story. A few sentences, isolated images or even individual words are enough. I think recording the emotions is just as important as recording what happened. After a while, patterns may become apparent that you simply couldn't see from a single dream. The same room might keep appearing, or a particular colour, person, animal or situation. You may then notice that these images tend to appear at particular moments in your waking life.
I've also seen how creatively transforming a nightmare can change the way somebody feels about it. A person might paint the landscape they found frightening, sculpt a figure that appeared in the dream, make a collage from recurring images or write an imaginary conversation with a dream character. There's something valuable about moving from being the passive recipient of an unsettling dream to actively engaging with its imagery. Sometimes the frightening image remains frightening, but it no longer feels quite so unknowable.
It's equally important to remember that not every nightmare needs a profound interpretation. Fever, illness, medication, disrupted sleep and periods of intense stress can all affect dreaming. So can the things we expose ourselves to before going to bed. If you've spent the evening watching a disturbing film, it shouldn't be terribly surprising if some of that imagery wanders into your dreams. I think we can become so enthusiastic about symbolism that we forget this. Not every strange image is a message from the depths of the psyche, just as every odd thought we have during the day isn't secretly revealing something profound.
For me, the most useful approach is to respect nightmares without becoming frightened of what they might supposedly mean. Sometimes they are simply unpleasant dreams. Sometimes they seem closely connected with stress or experiences we're trying to process. And occasionally they present an image so powerful that it stays with us and deserves further thought. Psychology, neuroscience, art therapy and symbolic interpretation offer different ways of approaching these experiences, and I don't think we necessarily have to choose only one. What matters is remaining curious without becoming overly certain. A nightmare may wake us in darkness with our heart pounding, but once we're awake, we have the opportunity to look at it differently. Sometimes, when we do, an image that initially seemed to contain nothing but fear turns out to have considerably more to say.