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What Causes Nightmares, and How Can You Decrease Them?
By day, Lisa (last name withheld) in Charleston, South Carolina has it all together: a solid marriage, beautiful kids, thriving career. By night, however, the beauty fades and something more sinister takes over. Lisa suffers from chronic, unpredictably spaced nightmares and has for decades. “Sometimes I will have multiple per night. Sometimes I will go two or three weeks without [one],” she explains in an email interview.
Lisa isn’t visited by the second coming of Freddy Krueger or anything like that, but the content of these terrible dreams is still pretty jarring. In one recurring nightmare, she’s driving too fast through a notorious Atlanta highway interchange known as “Spaghetti Junction,” and goes off the edge, crashing to her death. “It goes through my mind that I know I am doing it and everyone is going to be so disappointed in me,” she says.
Another example has her hunting down a demon in her mother-in-law’s house. “I have to work hard to climb and get to the demon, who is deep within the house, but with each dream I get closer,” she recalls. “The most recent one, I was looking through a knot in the wood door and he was looking back at me, eye to eye. It was horrible.”
Everyone has the occasional nightmare. Roughly 5 percent of the general population has at least one bad dream per week, says…
