Eli5 What nightmares are?
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Often times they’re your brain trying to make sense of negative emotions and experiences that we’ve experienced in our lives.
I remember reading about mice being put through mazes and then monitored while they were sleeping and dreaming – scientists saw that the parts of their brains used for navigating the mazes were lighting up over and over while they dreamt.
This was interpreted as their brains using dreams as part of integrating new knowledge of the mazes for future use.
If the same is true of humans, then nightmares may be an unfortunate byproduct of our brains trying to contextualise and resolve troubling issues in our lives in an abstracted way.
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