nightmares? Why would your brain scare you?
In: Biology
When you sleep, your brain goes through emotions and feelings you might not experience often when you are awake. This way you are familiar with them when it does occur. Think of it as training.
There are theories that say dreams/nightmares are your brain “trying to prepare you for future potential threats”.
What if the chemicals that make you experience fear are already present and the dream is a rationalization of your emotional state?
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One theory I read is that nightmares are simulations that our brain runs while our bodies are locked down.
Body: ok, I’m fully unconscious, won’t be moving much.
Brain: excellent, I’ll commence scenario 194729q – zombie attack in your elementary school with your high school friends working with you to rescue your college friends just in case it ever comes up.
Since we have memory fragments and ideas scattered in brain storage, the brain sometimes uses dreams to mush them together. When it’s dangerous or scary it’s a nightmare.
My brain does a lot of things while I’m awake that I don’t approve of/scare me. I can only assume it’s going to “do its worst” when fully off the leash, so to speak.
There’s a theory that nightmares are sort of like “practice” for real-life scary situations.
I’ve read a theory that people have nightmares to prepare you for the real life situations.
For example: when cavemen had nightmares it would probably be about being attacked by animals. So next time they would encounter something like that they already have some “experience”
Could be a reason why children have more nightmares than grown up people (based on what I hear and remember myself)
Off-Topic: Imagine if we made video game AIs so advanced, we had to make sure they didn’t “figure out” they were inside a game and refuse to continue playing along. We’d have to make sure they didn’t see things like loading screens, menus, respawning, etc. Or would we? Maybe they’d just make up their own explanations for us. “Dreams” perhaps. Imaginings. Maybe you even could load a bunch of AIs from different games into a weird mash-up crossover remix game, and then put them back into their worlds with their memories in-tact.
One theory, especially for recurrent nightmares, is that they’re your brain’s way of practicing for emergencies. Here’s a [source](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810005000772).
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