The upside of nightmares: How bad dreams are also good for you

"The earliest dream Chris could remember was one that haunted his mind for months during preschool. In it, he watched family members and pets melting during a house fire. They turned into “several humongous blobs that resembled bubbling pizza topping”, each containing fragments of their body parts. More than 25 years later, the images still haunt him.

For Jess, nightmares marked a difficult time in her late teens when she was struggling with anxiety. “I would sometimes miss weeks of school because of my nightmares,” she now recalls, several years later. “I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t function.” Jess remembers nights spent half awake, falling in and out of a recurring nightmare where she was unable to scream or move, engulfed by paralysing fear. Even after waking, she couldn’t escape the feeling of helplessness."

I have had some really gory dreams. Blood on the walls, people being mutilated. Emesis chasing me and punching out windows, etc. etc. But I can see catharsis in the dreams afterwards. If anything, I try to remember those dreams and correlations to my waking state.