While nightmares are often inspired by our own situations, some could be common to many people, with the same meaning.
Nightmares always follow a fairly bizarre or even sometimes surreal scenario. However, these experiences are inspired by many concrete details of your daily life and they generally correspond to events that really happened in your journey. Enough to sometimes make them unbelievably realistic.
Despite this very personal aspect, similarities make it possible to group nightmares and detect their common meaning. Certain themes are even very recurring, such as the presence of a monster, the feeling of falling or being hunted, or even helplessness in the face of a catastrophe.
“Dreams are linked to the situations and problems that each person encounters in their waking life,” confirms Michael Schreddl, a research director based in Mannheim (Germany), interviewed in the media Science Alert. He even believes that the nightmare allows individuals to become “directors” of their own life film.
But by analyzing more than 1,200 nightmares in one study and asking participants to remember their most recent bad dream, he and a colleague arrived at a classification, with common themes. The professor therefore listed the ten most frequent types of nightmares to reveal their hidden meanings:
10. The invasion of monsters, robots or more real animals (mice, cockroaches or rats) would be a sign of a fear of dirt or more generally of a feeling of insecurity.9. The evil presence such as that of a ghost, an alien or a demon would symbolize a feeling of intrusion into our private sphere and can also be a sign of great superstition.8. Disasters like fires, floods, nuclear fallout (4.5% of nightmares), are the result of a fear of the future, as your brain’s way of ruminating about something you fear will happen. .7. Forgetting a more or less specific object, or even something that is difficult to remember, would be linked to fear of the unknown.6. Disagreements, interpersonal conflicts or arguments can be signs of social anxiety in general or even shyness towards a specific person.5. Health problems or illness, whether our own case or that of other people (already 11.6% of nightmares), are among the most complex and generally evoke a loss of control over one’s life and its future.4. The escape or nightmare in which you are chased by an individual, or anything else for that matter, is characteristic of a situation (at work, in the family) from which you wish to escape but which seems inextricable to you.3. Accidents of any kind (falls, car accidents, drownings, or 15% of nightmares) would alert you to your feeling of helplessness in the face of an inevitable situation, a situation for which there is no solution, according to you. Your own death may be part of the nightmare.2. Physical aggression, an extreme version of conflict (see point 6), materializes in an attack, a violent fight in your dream and illustrates your feeling of vulnerability in the face of others, a battered self-esteem.1. Failure is finally the most common nightmare with more than 18% of nightmares reported. It can relate to a sporting competition, a professional mission or an exam (3% of nightmares alone). According to Michael Schreddl, this is a vast category that is more difficult to interpret and joins several of the nightmares cited above. In any case, it almost always results from a lack of self-confidence.
