What dreams Are Made Of

Vivid, panic-inducing stress dreams are no call about the but they can offer a wake-up more parts of your regular life that need fun, attention.

- 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 a test. Or the one about losing control of a car, or being chased by someone we desperately want to get away from. 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. "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, 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. "Dreams can be a fairly broad but accurate barometer of our waking levels of well-being."

And since we're living in anxious times, it's no surprise that there's been a surge in strange dreams and nightmares. Women have been having more dreams featuring aggressive interactions with others, according to research, while people with a lot of COVID stress are more likely to have nightmares about confinement, helplessness, war, separation, failure, totalitarianism, sickness, death, and apocalypse. It doesn't help that there is a war that is leading to sickness and death, not to mention climate change and major political and social upheaval.