We all need to sleep. Sleeping helps your body and your brain to repair itself; waking up refreshed, and ready to live life to following day.
When your brain is repairing itself it goes through memories of past events and all the feelings that you have felt over the past couple of hours, days or even months and years.
These feelings come up throughout the day, but you are usually too busy to notice. And so you’re able to bat these feelings away if they remind you of something bad, anxiety-provoking, or stressful.
When you are asleep your feelings have free reign to come up.
They try to give you a message, so your brain tries to attach the feelings to a situation to help you to see and understand what’S wrong.
This is why you can have a dream that seems so random, but wake up feeling stressed, anxious or uneasy.
Why are my dreams bad?
You are probably thinking, ‘why don’t I have good dreams when I am having fun, and everything is going great!’
Well, the reason for this is that throughout the day, happy feelings are far easier to manage!
Whereas the more negative feelings have nowhere to go, you push them down, and you try to ignore them.
When you go to sleep, your brain processes the day and is met with these negative feelings that it needs to address. So, it creates a dream to show you this feeling that needs sorting out.
A window into the unconcious
The founder of therapy and counselling Sigmund Freud said that dreams are a window to the unconscious. I.e. Trying to make the feelings you can’t see, visible.
Remember, it’s not the content of the dream that you need to be listening to, but rather the way that the dream makes you feel.
So if you feel worried when you wake up, ask yourself what’s going on in your life that you feel worried about? Maybe a piece of work you have been neglecting or a holiday that you need to prepare for?
Start listening to the message of your dreams to understand what you are really feeling and what needs fixing in your life.
Use your dreams to help better your life.