Why do I always have "dreams" that give me anxiety (aka: nightmares)? Why do I never just get to re-live my happy memories in my dreams? Wtf brain?!? This is outrageous! It's unfair!

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Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

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FistingEnthusiast@lemmynsfw.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Your brain is there to keep you alive

It isn’t there to make you happy

Life isn’t fair, it never was, and it never will be

Just make the most of things, because it’s all we have

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- shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  “Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default.”
  
  ― Peter Watts, Blindsight
  
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- HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Correct. My mouth and stomach are there to make me happy
  
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- rosco385@lemmy.wtf ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  Your brain is there to keep you alive
  
  No matter the technology we develop, will we ever escape the mindset of being prey?
  
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  - SpacetimeMachine@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    It doesn’t really have anything to do with being prey. It’s all about evolution. Even apex predators would have the same issue.
    
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  - jaggedrobotpubes@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    It’s not a mindset, it’s our whole system. We’d have to be made of something else.
    
    Or de-condition maybe.
    
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MalReynolds@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Observational bias : You remember only the bad ones, especially as they are the ones most likely to wake you, and thus cross the memory barrier to the conscious. You likely have good ones as well that you don’t remember.

If it really bothers you consider keeping a dream journal for a few months which should make you able to remember more, and more of your dreams. If it turns out you really have no good dreams, the next step is to learn lucid dreaming and fix that shit. If that’s too much work, you can try repeating “I will have good dreams” in your head as you go to sleep, you might be lucky.

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- SSUPII@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I genuinely never remember dreams. Until one day recently I dreamed of dreaming of my work laptop getting stolen, then waking up (in the dream) and going to work while telling a friend about the internal dream.
  
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  - Neondragon25@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    same, even remembering a dream is a big moment for me, I have to tell people.
    
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MelodiousFunk@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Has anyone else had that dream where a friend is explaining some sort of obscure trumpet offshoot with a tremolo key and a ridiculously intricate tuning compensator valve, and then he’s holding one except it’s basically a very small trombone with a weird apparatus off to one side, and then he plays it and the overtones are so incredibly rich that a single note almost sounds like a chord?

No?

Just me?

Okay.

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- littleomid@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Man I had the exact same dream last week
  
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  - HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Yeah, number 19b? That’s a fun dream
    
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  - MelodiousFunk@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Image
    
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theywilleatthestars@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Whenever I relive happy memories in my dreams I wake up sad because I remember what I’ve lost.

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- DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Still better than re-living traumatic memories…
  
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kibiz0r@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
You must have done something bad to deserve this. Trying thinking about everything bad you’ve ever done. That’ll help.

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- HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I didn’t want to remember the time I sneezed and accidentally launched a snot rocket at my neighbor. It missed his skin, thank gods, but it was pretty gross
  
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dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Same problem. After having a nightmare I wake up with a headache from the stress/anxiety.

Best solution I came up with, try to force yourself to become lucid in every dream by realizing that shitty experiences aren’t real (anymore) so you must be dreaming. Once you know you’re dreaming, you can consciously decide to not care anymore. Laugh in the face of your monsters/adversary, and calm down.

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- Prime@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Is it too warm in the bed? Sounds like lack of water. Try reducing the temperature or using thinner covers :)
  
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- HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Lucid dreaming doesn’t let my brain rest properly. Source, I did it every night for a year
  
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  - dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    That’s weird I never heard of anything like that. Perhaps you’re doing lucid dreaming wrong? Are you using methods that lets you slip into one, or do you naturally realize you’re dreaming amid a dream?
    
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s@piefed.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
This is a common symptom of CPTSD, if that is relevant to your prior experiences

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- DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Oh fuck.
  
  Family, lovely isn’t it.
  
  I remember when I was younger, my life was more peaceful because I suppressed the memories of my brother’s abusive behaviors. But as we keep fighting more and more, those memories resurfaced. Also parents are yell at me all the time. Mom why? 😢 You were supposed to protect me… where was that protection when I needed you the most.
  
  Omg I remember that day when I told my mom I wanna kms then she said she regretted giving birth to me.
  
  Now she’s telling me she loves me and when I confront her about it she never meant the bad thing she said.
  
  Bipolar much?
  
  Or it’s filial piety bs. Fucking hell. Fucking confucious runing lives from the grave.
  
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Breezy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Embrace the nightmare. Learn to take joy in the thrill like a roller coaster. They’ll stop at some point when you no longer view them the same, saddly. I learned to like them as a teen and then i either just stopped having them, or stopped remembering them compared to me other dreams.

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- Evil_Incarnate@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Yeah, I used to have dreams with zombies and stuff. They were some of my favourites as I’d end up killing zombies and other baddies in all sorts of gory ways. I’d wake up feeling like a hero.
  
  Now all I get are work anxiety dreams where everything goes wrong.
  
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abcdqfr@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Sleep/central apnea diet/medication/alcohol/lack-of-weed are the four horsemen to my nightmares. The damn persistent dreams where my legs take 1000% effort to just crawl. Usually I have to walk/lunge backwards just to get anywhere. Fuckin weird and constant.

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- bunnyBoy@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  That’s 100% your gateway to lucid dreaming though. If you can pick out one or two things that for whatever reason happen in most of your dreams, you just need to be able to remember them as they’re happening and you can take control. Of course, then you have to balance it with not realizing you’re asleep too hard, otherwise you wake up.
  
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Scubus@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
You are in this dream but we do not grant you the rank of happy. Please, take a seat.

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Bigfish@lemmynsfw.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
You might. But the scary or anxiety producing dreams are more likely to wake you up.

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Azzu@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Two factors in my view:

You don’t remember the good dreams, because we humans generally focus more on the bad things. Dreams generally don’t get remembered very easily, so you only remember the very impactful ones, which would thus be the bad ones

Afaik, you do have more bad dreams if your life is filled with anxiety or danger or whatever. Your dreams in some sense a reflection of your waking life. So if your life is very stressful, maybe try to change that, and that might also change the dreams.
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- 474D@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I’m at the point where I don’t even remember the bad dreams, my brain just blocks it all out when I wake up lol. According to my SO though, I have very intense, likely unpleasant dreams. Maybe you can be like me one day OP!
  
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planish@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I think it has something to do with your brain playing both sides of the dream. You are coming up with how to react, but you are also at the same time coming up with what happens next. So if you dream a lion and you are like “uhoh, what if the lion tried to chase me, that would be a problem, I’d have to run away,” then you’re now dreaming about a lion that is chasing you and how you are running away.

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- DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Am American. I guess the solution is always guns. Gun, guns, and gus. Kill anything that moves. Have a problem? Pew pew pew. Kill it dead, then kill it again. YEEHAW! (not texan, not white, not even born in this country, but I thought it’s funny, I guess I’m assimulating very well xD)
  
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BallShapedMan@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I’ve read if we wake up knowing what we dreamt about we likely aren’t getting enough sleep. Since then I’ve worked hard in my sleep cycle and haven’t remembered more than a dream or two a year in more than a decade. That was my solution, maybe give it a go?

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FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
As far as I know- and I’m far from an expert here- dreams are really just your brain trying to make sense of your brain doing whatever the fuck it is your brain is doing why you sleep. (maybe a de-fragmentation cycle to keep everything nice and functional? bad analogy, probably.)

in any case, your brain is trying to make sense of signals and synapses firing off, in what is basically a random pattern. so it cobbles together a reality as best it can and fit things to that.

Its also trying to maintain a certain amount of continuity with where you are. So, if you’re anxious while you fall a sleep, your brain is going to incorporate that anxiety.

Also, as Bigfish mentioned, the freaky/weird/anxious ones are more likely to wake you up so that you actually remember them.

In any case, I would suggest maybe changing your bedtime routine up and finding something positive/calming to focus on. crotchet works well for me. but it could be just about anything. a feel-good novel, or whatever. (I also suggest turning the screens off.)

might not change that the only things you remember are the unpleasant ones, but it might make them less frequent.

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- Thorry@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  This is mostly correct. It’s also the case that “dreams” are formed after you wake up. You aren’t dreaming while you are asleep, your brain is firing random shit that makes no sense. As soon as you start to wake it tries to piece together what the fuck was going on into something resembling a narrative. This piecing together is part of the waking up and not a part of the sleeping. This is why you can have a dream about an alarm going of for seemingly tens of minutes or even hours, while you are being woken up by your alarm going off. Your alarm probably hasn’t been going for more than a few seconds, but your brain incorporates it into the narrative. Now this isn’t to say you can’t have a bad dream or nightmare and be woken up by them. The random firing can definitely cause enough stress to wake you up. Especially if you are ill (fever dreams) or under a lot of stress in general, your brain can misbehave during sleep and wake you up. It’s just that the “story” part of the dream only happens when you wake up, while you are sleeping it is random.
  
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  - whaleross@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Oh this is interesting. I’ve recently come to terms with the amazing plasticity of the brain. So if the brain assembles a narrative only after the flood of random stimuli, it should be possible to train it to use certain baselines for what narratives to assemble.
    
    Any neurologists and psychiatrists and other brain specialists in the house?
    
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blimthepixie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
How much cheese are you eating?

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- DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Not much. I hate cheese unless its like pizza or a burger.
  
  Is this some nutrient deficiency thing, cuz I for a moment I thought you were talking about if I were dreaming about cheese or something lol
  
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  - FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    the idea that cheese affects your dreams is kinda… folklore. Most likely, it’s simply the act of eating right before bed is the problem. (your body doing digestion stuff affects your sleep cycle, making it hard for you to sleep well.)
    
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  - HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    
    I hate cheese
    
    Can I have your cheese if you’re not gonna eat it
    
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  - blimthepixie@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Just the cheese ≠ nightmares thing
    
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- A_norny_mousse@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  There was (early 1900s) a cartoon series about a guy having weird dreams every time they ate a grilled (?) cheese sandwhich before going to sleep.
  
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Lag@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
It’s a way of organizing, learning and preparing you for the day ahead. It would be useful if it’s about life or death stuff. For me I stress too much about small stuff until that’s all I see, so sometimes we need to watch some gore and car crash videos to gain perspective.

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- DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  I once saw a mushroom cloud outside my window, then I woke up…
  
  Wtf am I supposed to do about a fucking nuke lmfao
  
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  - gdog05@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Get under your desk with your hands on your head. Get inside a fridge from the 40’s or earlier. Do a journal entry. Make a pose that will leave future scientists confused as hell.
    
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  - HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    I mean, we got evacuated because of fire. It got pretty close to our house (the front line of a major fire was less than a half mile away) and our neighbors woke us up in the middle of the night to gtfo. Sky was orange all day, but it started at 2am instead of sunrise.
    
    Every once in a while the sky outside the window in my dreams is orange. Always freaks me the fuck out.
    
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  - Lag@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    There you go organizing, I’m proud of you.
    
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  - FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    move to Jericho.
    
    (iykyk.)
    
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Gonzako@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
My dreams are weirdly problem solving. They give me insights on how to handle things.

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