Few of us make it through childhood without getting the wits scared out of us by a nightmare. Michel Jouvet, professor of experimental medicine and author of The Paradox of Sleep, theorizes such dreams may be behavioral rehearsals for survival, connecting emotions with corresponding actions. The dragon chasing you in your childhood dream is Nature’s version of virtual reality, a zero-consequence environment teaching the emotion blood-curdling fear naturally accompanies the behavior run like hell. The jolt that jerks you out of sleep makes sure you’ll remember the connection. Screaming for Mom reinforces using your attachments (and tribe) as a secure base.
You’ve got to hand it to Nature–nightmares are an ingenious way of cultivating survival.
Nightmares arising from trauma may also be opportunities to learn life lessons. Yet it’s hard to imagine looking for the meaning of a nightmare when it is about the most horrific moments of one’s past. What lesson could be learned from such terror and suffering?
Psychology researcher Matthew Walker and Dr. Murray Raskind suggest using the drug prazosin to end nightmares associated with PTSD. Prazosin, a drug originally marketed to treat blood pressure, also makes people less sensitive to the stress hormone noradrenaline. In our more benign dreams, when noradrenaline drops off, emotional intensity also diminishes. And emotional intensity is what makes nightmares feel real and frightening.
While recognizing the importance of emotions, Walker believes repetitive nightmares are a sign that traumatic stress has lasted too long. From an interview with Amy Standen of NPR:
“But I don’t think it’s adaptive to hold onto that emotional blanket around those memories forever,” he says. “They’ve done their job at the time of learning, then it’s time to hold on to the information of that memory, but let go of the emotion.”
I agree with Walker in principle. It’s best to learn life’s lessons and get on with the business of living. Yet I also have faith in two million years of human evolution. And I believe medicating the symptoms of distress can interfere with natural and evolved capacities for overcoming trauma.
John Briere, a psychologist at USC, looks to “ethnocultural” beliefs to augment the Western understanding of trauma. An ethnocultural lens examines both how cultures address trauma and what is perceived as traumatic experiences. According to Briere, many non-Western cultures equate soul loss with what the West calls PTSD. Similarly, Peter Levine wrote about a culture that described trauma as rape of the soul. Universally, trauma can lead to isolation, and isolation leads to soul loss. We need meaningful connections to keep soul alive.
Soul loss also occurs in the West, even though the word soul is avoided, especially in medicine. Yet you know you are at risk of losing your soul if after a traumatic event (or series of events) you spend a great deal of time hypervigilant, looking for signs the traumatic event might recur. Over time, the unrelenting fear and anxiety become too much, and solace is sought, often in addictions. Behavior is also inhibited to avoid being triggered. Without intervention, the habit of avoiding reminders of the original trauma leads to an isolated existence. For some, this may mean literally shutting out the world. For others, not letting people get to know them becomes the primary defense. For many, addictions create a wall against humanity.
For millions of years humans lived in close-knit groups in which everyone played a vital role in the clan’s survival. It wasn’t an option to have someone cooped up in the house, isolated, watching TV, drowning distress in alcohol—or whatever a traumatized caveperson might have done to avoid reminders of trauma. That would never happen, and not because there weren’t TVs or houses. Survival was too precarious for our hunter-gatherer ancestors to feed and shelter a traumatized person unable to contribute to daily needs. (In US history, one of the original appeals of mental institutions was the opportunity to house family members who couldn’t work and thus drained family resources.)
In a society that listens for the meaning of dreams, nightmares might alert the group to the presence of threats too big for one person to handle. Traumatic stress is by nature communicable. In psychotherapy we have a term for the contagious quality of trauma: vicarious traumatization. I have come to believe the infective quality of trauma is part of its so-called symptomatolgy. Traumatic stress may have evolved to be somewhat “contagious” since any experience that is traumatic to one of us is potentially a threat to us all.
Perhaps in our isolated and medicalized society, prescribing drugs for nightmares is the most humane response. When traumatic stress results in a life lived in isolation, it can be daunting to get back in the world, amidst all the potential triggers. Having a drug to dampen traumatic defenses is not an unreasonable initial form of support. Yet ultimately, we need opportunities for collective responses to trauma that keep the traumatized person from becoming isolated in the first place.
Research shows that when people find meaning in traumatic experiences they can recover (and often without professional help). Survivors of Pearl Harbor who interpreted their nightmares as reasonable responses to the bombings were able to get on with their lives. Yet knowing that responses are reasonable often requires talking to others about our experiences.
If isolation is the downward spiral of trauma, then perhaps nightmares are the phoenix’s call from the ashes. Even in trauma, nightmares have a lesson to teach. Yet deciphering their meaning may need the entire tribe’s attention. In the case of returning Veterans, nightmares of war may be a call for Americans to collectively address war’s scourge on the souls of young soldiers, along with the intergenerational impact of war, which as a nation we have a long history of ignoring.
If you would like to support Veterans who could benefit from someone listening to their stories, visit When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home.
I spent a good part of my youth in San Antonio, Texas, where Bihl Haus Arts exhibits the work of artist Debora Kuetzpal Vasquez. My grandfather owned a couple of Mexican curio shops on the River Walk. As a child I was given piñatas on birthdays and sugar skulls on the Day of the Dead. Like many, I am drawn to the bold colors and whimsical nature of Mexican folk art. Kuetzpal Vasquez’s exhibit translates the vitality of this tradition into a message about healing domestic violence. In an article for MySanAntonio.com, she calls her show “a healing exhibition.”
Debora Kuetzpal Vasquez also teaches art that heals. From the article by Elda Silva:
In an art class she teaches, Debora Kuetzpal Vasquez asks students to write down a bad memory in a journal, then paint over it in white. The last step of the exercise is to “paint something beautiful over it,” Vasquez says. The idea is not to gloss over the past, but “to try to move that memory into something different.”
Keutzpal Vasquez takes a similar approach to her multimedia show at Bihl Haus Arts. The exhibit was inspired by interviews with women about their experiences of domestic abuse. The installation makes up different rooms of a house. Like the art her students create, abusive words inscribed on walls leave traces in the paint that covers them.
Keutzpal Vasquez describes her exhibit as a “safe place,” and adds in her interview with Silva, “I always say if there’s anywhere in the world that you should be safe, it’s in your home.”
So true.
Last spring I reviewed research conducted by Robert Miller and David Johnson that showed PTSD correlated with higher levels of creativity. Recently the New York Times shared the story of Sgt. Matthew Pennington, who is healing PTSD in part through acting in a film. You can learn about the film, “A Marine’s Guide to Fishing,” here. The NYT article about Pennington begins a series of profiles of wounded Veterans.
Ideas about the nature of “healing” are regularly batted around the culture of psychotherapy. The word ”transformation” also comes up, which feels sympathetic with a depth psychological perspective, but can also sound somewhat grand and mysterious, although not in the following poem by Stephen Dunn. I like how Dunn highlights the resistance to change that is a regular part of psychotherapy, along with the felt sense of being on the other side, after the transformation, when we can see we have “healed.”
WHERE HE FOUND HIMSELF
The new man unfolded a map and pointed to a dark spot on it. “See, that’s how far away I feel all the time, right here, among all of you,” he said. “Yes,” John the gentle mule replied, “alienation is clearly your happiness.” But the group leader interrupted, “Now, now, let’s hear him out, let’s try to be fair.” The new man felt the familiar comfort of everyone against him. He went on about the stupidities of love, life itself as one long foreclosure, until another man said, “I was a hog, a terrible hog, and now I’m a llama.” To which another added, “and me, I was a wolf. Now children walk up to me, unafraid.” The group leader asked the new man, “What kind of animal have you been?” “A rat that wants to remain a rat,” he said, and the group began to soften as they remembered their own early days, the pain before the transformation.—Stephen Dunn, Everything Else in the World
“Healing,” “transformation,” whatever we call it, can be profound or subtle. Sometimes it’s a small shift in how one is in the world or how one sees oneself. That’s all that’s needed to right that feeling of somehow being all wrong (or wronged). But sometimes a big change is required, like a hog turning into a llama. When this happens, there is usually a need to drop well-honed “human” defenses–the stonewalling, the addictions, the slick arguments, the sly manipulations and passive aggressions–and trust the need for love and play that resides in all of us…and simply let go. Pain is an inevitable part of the journey. The pain lasts the longest when we resist acknowledging to ourselves that the best we can do is get out of our own way. The reward is great when we finally stop defending against pain. We become more human, more compassionate with ourselves and others.
