WHAT YOUR STRESS DREAMS ARE TRYING TO TELL YOU

It's a lot more than that you're, well, stressed! Unsettling dreams-on the rise since the pandemic - can offer clues about what needs to change in your waking life.

- STACEY COLINO

We've probably all had that dream about showing up for a class decades after we're out of school, unaware that there's an exam. Or the one about losing control of a car, or being chased by scary people. You might wake up with a start, heart racing, brow moist, wondering. What was that about?! Sometimes you can go back to sleep; at other times, the adrenaline makes it nearly impossible.

Anxiety-related dreams are common and often include themes of being humiliated, threatened or attacked by someone or something; getting lost, sick or stuck in a bad situation; and being chased or involved in some kind of accident or disaster. They're not generally literal representations of our lives, yet "dreams can be a fairly broad but accurate barometer of our waking levels of well-being," says Antonio Zadra, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at the University of Montreal and a senior researcher at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine. "Our brains take emotionally salient events from our waking lives and weave them into a dream narrative" that may reflect what we're stressed or concerned about, he says.

And since we're living in anxious times, it's no surprise that there's been a surge in strange dreams and nightmares. In fact, 2022 research in the journal Nature and Science of Sleep reported that people who were personally affected in some way by COVID-19 had more bad dreams at night-and if they themselves had been sick, the more severe their disease, the more nightmares they had. "Given that we have more anxious thoughts during times of stress, it's hardly a shock that we have more anxiety dreams and nightmares," says Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., a dream researcher at Harvard Medical School. In fact, some experts believe dreams play a role in emotional regulation-that their narratives serve as a form of offline processing of daytime drama.