Healing from Trauma: Nightmares and New Perspectives

Traumas are terrifying and may challenge everything previously believed about the safety of the world and yourself. After a traumatic event, nightmares are common and upsetting.

The Embodied Cognition Theory of Dreaming (ECTD) says dreams and nightmares reflect your understanding of yourself and the world. That understanding appears as schemas, which is a term for concise mental patterns. In dreaming, you are trained in the schemas. It further says your waking emotions identify important patterns of thoughts, experiences, and memories to incorporate into schemas. So why are dreams and nightmares so strange? They are strange because much of what matters to us are abstract concepts like love and power. Research shows that abstract concepts are neurologically linked to the physical experiences of being in the waking world, and what shows in dreams and nightmares is the physical experience that underlies the abstract concepts.

For example, if you are concerned about your boss firing you during an upcoming meeting, then that fear may lead to a nightmare. In the nightmare, you are shoved into a room with a monster who attacks you. You have to try to fend off the monster who forces you out into a forest where you feel lost. The physical experiences of being shoved in a room, defending yourself from a physical attack, and being lost in a forest metaphorically ground the experiences of being forced into a meeting, being verbally attacked, having your job threatened, and the fear of being jobless.

Events are traumatic because they don’t fit your previous understanding of yourself and the world. For example being physically attacked, beaten, and robbed may challenge long held beliefs that you are strong, independent, and likeable and that the world is safe. Suddenly, core abstract concepts related to the safety of the environment and your place in the environment are challenged. At first, the process that organizes schemas is unable to isolate the important patterns of the event because of the intensity and its unprecedented nature. The entire trauma is replayed in nightmares until you start to understand the meaning of the event.

Over time and with reflection, the significance of the trauma becomes clear, and your nightmares shift from replays to metaphoric nightmares that capture both the abstract and physical significance of it. Instead of replaying being attacked, beaten, and robbed on the street, the nightmare is an experience of coming to a dead-end in the mountains, having rocks fall on you from above and trap you, and having to leave behind your backpack with your hiking gear in order to escape the rock pile. The metaphors in the new nightmare relate to the abstract experiences of being powerless, overwhelmed, and having to let go of some aspects of security to move forward. Your dreaming continues to organize your schemas and train you in those schemas, which corresponds with your recovery from the trauma. Eventually, the experience of the trauma becomes less of a day to day emotional concern, leading to it being selected less commonly for schema organization and rehearsal in dreaming.

The nightmares shifting back to normal dreaming is consistent with the integration of the trauma experience into your self-understanding and understanding of the external world. It also coincides with the traumatic experience having less emotional intensity.

A takeaway from ECTD is that posttraumatic nightmares are part of psychologically recovering from trauma. Ongoing nightmares that replay the trauma or that repeat a metaphoric nightmare are indicative of the need to formulate a new understanding of self and the world that can encompass the trauma.