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I find the whole topic of dreams extremely interesting and i could ask many many questions about it. But anyway...

I am currently reading an old Sherlock Holmes anthology my father gave me after i mentioned i had only read one SH book. I am greatly enjoying the novel, but a small conversation between SH and the doc started me thinking about dreams.

In the book, Watson is telling Holmes that he has been disturbed by the case, he has diffculty sleeping as he is imagining different scenarios after seeing the grimace on the face of a murdered mans body. He says he doesnt quite understand it because he saw his comrades "hacked to pieces" in Afghanistan and suffered no ill effects from it. Holmes says that he understands because that "without the imagination, there can be no horror"

So this means what exactly? That the things we conjur with our mind while we are sat thinking or dreaming can be far more disturbing that real things and events? This could be true, as i have had some gruesome dreams during my life. I remember a few years back, In one i fell into a very large and deep pool of water and when i looked to my left under the ocean i saw a Beholder swimming towards me at speed! I gak myself and woke up panting for air and sweating heavily. It looked kinda like this one!



But it causes us no trauma, because we know it is just a dream!

And since my last tour, I have dreamed about Afghanistan plenty of times, I once dreamed that i was laying on the floor back in Kajaki where so much of our combat took place, and a Taliban guy was clawing out from under the ground and he started digging my guts out with his fingernails but i couldnt move? But of course nothing of this has disturbed me, because i just wake up and go "it was just a dream" and happily go back to sleep anyway.

So, what i want to know is, isnt what Holmes said entirely wrong? Why is it that our dreams can be so much more gruesome than in real life, but they cannot cause us psychological harm? And real events, are very mediocre compared to the dreams we have, and yet can traumatise people?

I mean, I once found a suicide bombers head on the floor 300 yards from where he blew his VBIED up but it never came back to life and then started flying around spitting fireballs or something. As a result, it was pretty boring and we all just wanted to take a picture.

Real events to me dont seem particularly gruesome, but people need counciling for them all the time. Gun fights, fist fights, blood, death, it all seems tame to me compared to the bizaarre events we can conjur while alseep, especially since we watch all the violent movies we do! I think my 8 year old nephew would take great pleasure in seeing a gun battle after he saw ED-209 blow a guys face off in Robocop and shrieked with delight.

So CAN a dream cause any lasting mental harm to a dreamer? And if not, why not?

I think it's different for everyonebut generally no I think in most cases a dream don't cause much mental harm because as you said we wake up, we're scared for a while, then we go "Oh thank God, it was just a dream," then we go back to sleep. It's the basic understanding I guess between knowing the difference between the surreal and the real. Most people understand that a dream is just a dream and that nothing in it real. It's kind of like when we watch a violent movie, none of us get traumatized by watching the violent and sometimes mind effy things on the big screen. I guess the closest thing to being traumatized by something like that is not sleeping because you saw a scary movie.

I think though that when a particular dream gets repeated a lot it can screw with you a bit. Like your brain might be trying to let you know something about yourself, like a fear, a need, a want, etc but ultimately once again most people just say "meh it's just a dream." I guess when people start over interpreting the meanings of dreams that can screw with your head a bit but on the whole once again I don't think too many people take it too seriously. I mean the thing I dream about consistently every month or so is Zombies. lol I don't why i do, it's scary as hell but it probably has no meaning other than I'm afraid of zombies.

I wouldn't know.

I wake up too quickly to remember them.
(there is a correlation to the 'speed' at which you awaken and recall. The longer you take to become awake, the more of it you remember. I pretty much *snap* wake up.)

Yes, I know I can 'train' myself to wake slower.
Why would I want to? I'm well aware of just what is locked into that little box I dare not look into - which is why it stays locked. Disassociation has its benefits.

chromedog wrote:I wouldn't know.

I wake up too quickly to remember them.
(there is a correlation to the 'speed' at which you awaken and recall. The longer you take to become awake, the more of it you remember. I pretty much *snap* wake up.)

Yes, I know I can 'train' myself to wake slower.
Why would I want to? I'm well aware of just what is locked into that little box I dare not look into - which is why it stays locked. Disassociation has its benefits.

Yeah thats the thing too, I usually forget 99% of my dreams anyways so there's no time to be traumatized by them lol.

Like others have said, it's easier to simply dismiss a dream. In fact many people who are traumatised by real events try to do this, and dismiss a traumatic experience as a dream or part of their imagination (which is sometimes the only way to cope for the short-term, but very unhealthy as they'll eventually confront it as a reality).

I could see people being traumatised by a particularily disturbing dream, but once they came to grips with the fact that it wasn't real it's really impossible to cause lasting mental damage. An exception would be repeated instances of the same dream, where the dreamer may be under the impression that either they are reliving past events or are unable to differentiate the two.

People can suffer mental trauma from unreal events that occur in waking life, such as schizophrenic voices.

I don't see why people might not suffer trauma from unreal events in dreams.

Unless it is the realisation that the voices cannot be real but they must be because it is not a dream that causes the trauma.

I suppose it could for one who is unable to differentiate between dream and reality, like a small child or a schizo. As a child I used to watch a TV show, but had a dream about watching an episode of them where they all got killed, and it seriously messed me up as a kid.

My missus had a full blown night terror one time - literally jumping on top of me shrieking in fear whilst asleep...but not. She was sort of awake because she was hallucinating an enormous (like 2ft across) spider crawling up our bed. It was like a waking nightmare. Very weird, and certainly not a pleasant fething way to be woken up!

Anyway, since then she's been terrified of spiders. She wasn't before this incident.

While I'm hesitant to use the term "traumatized",I have experienced some extremely vivid dreams which have remained quite clear to me,even over many decades.
The best example would be that,as a small boy,five or six perhaps,my Grandmother always told me that If I told a lie my tongue would fall out,subsequently I had a dream as a child in which I was attempting to tell a lie and and my tongue fell from my mouth and begin to flop about on the floor like a bloody fish,I then found myself crawling about the floor,blood pouring from my mouth, attempting to catch my tongue and shove it back into my mouth while my family stood about chanting "LIAR".

I had this dream over 30 years ago,and it is just as vivid to me today as it was when I first had it,I can say that because of that dream I have always done my best to avoid lying.

I think the only dreams that cause serious psychological trauma is night terror. It's when nightmares have become so intense that the person suffering from it becomes afraid to go to sleep. That can really mess someone up.

I once had I seriously fragged up dream that took place in my house, back when I still lived with my mother. A lot of disturbing things happened, laugther and voices from bottomless drains and pipes, some shadowy evil in our backyard that I tried to make visible by throwing a blanket over it and the punching it - which didn't really work out, so I fled, trying to get away from it. I wanted to wake my mother before abandoning the house, so I ran into her room, shouting we had to leave...
...and realized in one shocking moment that it wasn't really my mother in her bed, but more of the twisted, shadowy evil that had lurked in our backyard. I knew it was coming for me...and at that moment I realized I was dreaming, but I couldn't wake up! I was absolutely trapped! For a few very, very bad seconds I was in both worlds at the same time, trying to open my eyes in the real world, glimpsing my real room for microseconds before being drawn back into my dream, where this shadowy evil came closer and closer for the kill.
In one huge mental effort i was able to rip myself out of the dreamworld and lay panting and shivering in my bed. The bad thing was - I was not completely sure that the dream could really be over. The dream had taken place in my house, with everything looking exactly like in real life. And now I was there, apparently awake, but only one room away from where the evil lurked. I knew my mother wasn't home, she was on vacation, so I knew I was alone, which didn't make things better.
I finally grabbed a hunting knife from my desk and banged the door of my room open, clearing every room of the house, looking for...something. But I still felt so alienated by my surroundings that I couldn't stay in the house, it drove me crazy. I pulled boot and jacket on quickly and left the house, the knife still halfway concealed in my right hand, I didn't dare to go without it. After half an hour walking around my neighborhood in the early morning hours, I slowly became more calm and, well, more sure I was really awake.
A few hours later I had to write an exam in university...yeah, I wasn't that rested while writing it.

That was the most fragged up dream I ever had, I think. Mainly because I couldn't wake up properly for those few frightening seconds and was somehow trapped between dream and reality. I never had something like that happen again and I don't really would want to. It hadn't had any permanent effects on me, but that's one of the dreams I remember very well, even it was years ago.