Anxiety is not limited to our waking lives. It can frequently invade our dreams. Those with driving fears may have dreams that highlight their driving anxiety or driving phobia – or the dreams can touch on any number of topics, from being naked in public to flunking an important exam.
Rather than trying to erase the dreams from your mind the moment you wake up, you can ask yourself a few questions to determine if those dreams are trying to tell you something.
What’s going on in your life that could bring up the dream’s distress?
True, the real-life anxiety may be far less severe than the dream’s panic, but something may be troubling you just the same. Is there a specific situation, event or that mirrors the dream?
For instance, if you’re failing an exam in the dream, is there an upcoming situation where you fear you’ll fail? Dreams about being naked in public often reflect real-life shame or vulnerability. And if you’re unprepared while taking the stage in your dream, you may feel unprepared for something life is throwing you.
Did the dream stir up something you’ve been attempting to ignore?
While the dream may not showcase the exact scenario you’re trying to ignore or avoid, it could give you a variation of it. Perhaps you need to have a serious talk with your spouse about an ongoing issue but know it’s going to lead to a confrontation, something you typically go out of your way to avoid.
Your anxiety dream may highlight you avoiding confrontation, such as running off a stage where you were supposed to perform or fleeing a bullfighting ring before the bull even shows up.
Is the dream preparing you for an upcoming situation?
Facing our fears is tough – but it’s also one of the most effective ways to deal with them. Facing fears head-on can seem way to horrifying, which is where our dreams can help us out. Anxiety dreams may be a way of exposing ourselves to a specific fear so it deflates some of that horror.
One example, from a study published in Consciousness and Cognition, discovered students who dreamt about their upcoming entrance exam the night before the test actually performed better on the exam than those who had not dreamed about it. Here researchers noted being exposed to the scary situation in the dream helped dispel the fear, resulting in what they called a “cognitive gain.”
Dreams that keep exposing you to fearful events are actually allowing your body to prepare itself for facing such events in real life. You can thus think of certain anxiety dreams as a kind of dress rehearsal of what’s to come, making you more prepared when you face the situation down the road.
Carefully examining and thinking about your anxiety dreams can arm you with a lot of power that may make it possible to enjoy an overall reduction of anxiety while you’re awake.
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