Why You Should Also Enjoy Nightmares

http://www.nosleeplessnights.com/stop-nightmares-night-terrors/.

 

When it comes to dreams, nightmares seem to get the short end of the stick. People seem to prefer dreams where their wishes are fulfilled and dislike anxiety dreams. I too enjoy happy dreams, but I also enjoy anxiety dreams, sometimes even more than the happy ones.

For me, happy dreams are followed by an unwanted feeling of melancholy because I start thinking of how nice it would be if that certain dream was a reality. This is not the case with nightmares—I love not being killed by a stranger in the dark. For that reason, nightmares are followed by a feeling of happiness and relief that it was all just a dream.

While I don’t want nightmares to be real, I still find them oddly entertaining just because of how different they are from everyday life. They make life interesting in a way because they typically put us in positions that we will (hopefully) never find ourselves in. I think of nightmares as a free and better version of a horror movie.

As time has gone by, I have been able to lucid dream a couple of times. Lucid dreaming is a state where you are aware that you are dreaming and have partial or complete control over the dream. This makes nightmares even more interesting because it is one thing to have an unusual and scary experience and it is another to be able to overcome and control the situation.

Dreams are generally fascinating just because we are making up the whole narrative in our heads, but one can argue that nightmares are even more so because not only are we making up the story in our heads, but we are also holding ourselves prisoners to that narrative; we force ourselves to go through an unwanted experience. Why? Who knows? All we can do is sit back and try to make the most out of the experience.

 

Works Cited

“Nightmare Image.” No Sleepless Nights, 29 May 2018, http://www.nosleeplessnights.com/stop-nightmares-night-terrors/.