Having a nightmare can cause a strong emotional response with emotions like fear, anxiety, despair, sadness or even disgust surfacing.
But there has been a lot of discussion about what it actually means if you die during a dream – and whether it can impact on your waking life too – and now experts have weighed in about what can be the utlimate result.
Around 85% of adults experience a nightmare at least once a year, with around one in 20 people experiencing nightmares every week.
Sleep experts discuss this phenomenon further warning that some nightmares could in fact lead to the dreamer’s unlikely demise with serious health complications for others.
Professor Tiina Paunio, sleep expert from the University of Helsinki, said: “Generally, the health risks of nightmares are typically indirect and are linked to the causative factors that underly nightmares,” reports MailOnline.
She added: “In vulnerable individuals, for example, those with a heart disease, nightmares can indirectly contribute to death, although this is rare.”
And according to Paunio and other experts, dreams involving dying could actually mean death in real life.
There are a number of studies that have found that frequent nightmares seriously increase a person’s risk of having a heart attack, with one study by Korea University in Seoul finding that people who experienced nightmares were twice as likely to have major risk factors for cardiac arrest.
This is because during a nightmare, a person’s noradrenaline, a brain chemical involved in a fight or flight response, spikes in certain regions of the brain which in turn causes a jolt of adrenaline. Experts warn that this chemical could be toxic in large doses for certain organs in the body including the heart, as when adrenaline comes into contact with a person’s heart’s muscle cells it causes it to contract.
When experiencing a nightmare, a large dose of adrenaline pumps through the body with the flight or fight response not being able to turn off meaning the heart won’t be able to relax causing an abnormal, and occasionally, fatal heart rhythm.
However, one of the main results of a nightmare about death – or anything else – is far less worrying but no less frustrating.
Professor Mark Blagrove, a psychologist and nightmare expert from Swansea University, said: “One of the big problems with nightmares when they occur is that people can lose sleep as a result of it.”
The lack of sleep will have obvious effects on the body with potential health conditions exacerbated by lack of sleep and stress from nightmares including an increased risk of metabolic disorders such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart attacks and strokes.
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