What are the symptoms of nightmare disorder?
The main symptom of nightmare disorder is a pattern of nightmares. While it’s common to have nightmares every once in a while, if you have them frequently and they interfere with your daily functioning, you may have nightmare disorder.
Common themes of nightmares include threats to your:
- Survival
- Physical well-being.
- Security.
You may also experience the following physical symptoms when you have a nightmare:
- Sweating.
- Shortness of breath.
- Racing heart.
The main emotion nightmares cause is fear, although you may experience other emotions such as:
- Anger
- Anxiety.
- Embarrassment.
- Disgust.
- Shame.
- Sadness.
These physical symptoms and emotions can occur during the dreaming episode, upon awakening from the nightmare or when later remembering the dream.
Due to nightmare disorder, you may have:
- Mood disturbance, such as anxiety or depression.
- Sleep resistance.
- Fatigue.
- Daytime sleepiness (hypersomnia).
- Difficulty concentrating.
- Behavioral issues.
- Impaired functioning at work or school.
- Impaired social functioning.
Quality sleep is very important to your overall health, so it’s important to talk to your healthcare provider if you think you have nightmare disorder.
What causes nightmare disorder?
Researchers continue to study sleep and its effect on us. While they’ve learned a lot about sleep, dreams and nightmares, there’s still much that’s unknown.
Researchers don’t know what exactly causes nightmares and nightmare disorder, but they have multiple theories.
One theory is that nightmare disorder may be influenced by increased hyperarousal that builds during the day and remains at night.Hyperarousal is a mood-altering symptom in which you’re consistently irritable, angry and paranoid. It’s a well-known symptom of PTSD and insomnia. Hyperarousal may make certain areas of your brain overactive while you sleep, causing nightmares.
Another theory involves a concept called fear extinction. Under regular circ*mstances, your brain is able to combine fearful memories with new and unrelated contexts to allow for normal sleep and dreams. This is called fear extinction. According to the impaired fear extinction theory, people with nightmare disorder continue to activate fear memories during sleep. The theory states that people who have difficulty regulating their emotions in stressful situations and tend to react negatively to stress are more prone to nightmares.
