Posts Tagged ‘negative influence of emotions’

Night Terrors

Night terrors may occur due, not to frightening dreams such as a nightmare, but to sudden and powerful body changes such as difficulty in breathing, or a sudden drop in your pulse.

Night Terrors often Linked with Difficulty in Breathing

Night terrors occur most often in children and usually decrease as the children mature. A cause noticed as long ago as the nineteenth century was that many cases of night terrors happened to children who showed early signs of heart disease. In other children, after removal of the adenoids the terrors disappeared. Like tonsils, adenoids are a glandular tissue that lies at the back or the mouth behind the soft palate. If enlarged they can interfere with breathing.

Night terrors are characterized by abrupt awakening, sometimes with a scream; a sleeping child may sit up in bed, apparently terror-stricken, with wide-open eyes, and often with frozen posturing that may last several minutes. Afterward there typically is no recollection of dreamlike experience.

According to Professor Colin Sullivan, head of the clinic, people gripped in a night terror are in a “state of absolute panic .

“I have seen patients injure themselves by pushing their hand through a plate glass window and run out onto a balcony and fall off,” he said.

Night Terrors are Differnt to Nighmares

Sleepers sufferind night terrors who are shocked awake will likely be disoriented and confused. Try very gently to help them find their own way to a couch, the floor, or back to their beds. Sometimes a softly repeated suggestion will do the trick. When waking them is necessary, try repeating their names, very quietly, over and over again.

Scientists distinguish between nightmares and night terrors, the term for terrifying nocturnal experiences that mainly affect young children in deep sleep. The principal difference is that the sleeper seldom remembers a night terror. Sleepers in the throes of a night terror often awaken to the feeling of being suffocated or choked.

Although this doesn’t apply to children, learning a different relationship with emotions and dream images can cure night terrors. Most people take their emotions as some sort of reality. I mean by this that a dreamed of car cannot hurt you in any way. A car in the physical world can crush your body. If you begin to realise that the only thing that can raise terror is our own reaction to your emotions.

Emotions Can Kill

In 1898 Crile was on an army transporter off Cuba and examined a young officer who was delirious with fear due to facing his first battle. He was as deep in shock as if his legs had been crushed by a wagon as William Lyndman’s had. This led Crile to become interested in exophthalmic goitre, an illness which produces a similar type of anxiety condition. Despite the use of anaesthetics, no one had successfully operated on such a goitre condition. Every patient died. Crile discovered why when he attempted such an operation in 1905.

While under anaesthesia the patients heart rate rose to 218 and the body temperature rose to a dangerous level. Despite no physical injury or infection, the patient died that night with a temperature of 109.6 F. Crile realised from his previous observations that it was fear which had killed the patient. Therefore he told his next patient, a young woman who needed the goitre operation, that he was going to give her a simple inhalation treatment. When she breathed in the anaesthetic, she therefore thought she was having a ‘treatment’ not an operation. She was the first person to survive the operation for exopthalmic goitre. Crile called it “stealing the goitre”, and was so impressed by the influence of emotion on the body he constantly stressed the importance of self control, and taught that calmness is strength.

Emotions and Mood in Dreams

Dreams often involve intense emotions. This feature examines how to work with these and what part they play in our health.

Emotions and Mood in Dreams

There is a level of human experience which is typified by intense emotional and physical response to life. Such emotions and bodily drives may remain almost entirely unconscious until touched by exploring your dream content in the right setting, or by being revealed by dramatic events in your life. When such feelings and bodily movements arise, as they do in dreams, we may be amazed at their power and clarity. See: processing dreams; Techniques for Exploring your Dreams – movements during sleep.

We are all unconsciously aware of how emotions and mood flow into physical movement and actions as well as influencing our personal response to life. We recognise how someone who is vivacious is expressing lively emotions. Similarly someone who is depressed physically is obviously withdrawn emotionally. In fact emotions are not only what energises us, but also what can pull us down, cause us to withdraw or give up. The feelings we have about people and events are also sensors telling us how we are responding, what frightens us, what excites us. So any means used to deaden emotions such as nicotine, alcohol and pain killers also deadens these sensors.

It is now well known that emotions can have very destructive effects on the body, as in grief and anxiety. Also the healing effects of laughter and pleasure are equally marked. Dreams help us see how our moods and emotions are influencing our health and general responsiveness in life.

If we take away the images and events occurring in a dream and simply look to see what feelings or emotions are evident, the dream is often more understandable than if we try to interpret the symbols. Feelings in dreams are nearly always undistorted. We therefore do not need to interpret them, simply to recognise them and see if we can recognise where they occur in waking life.

The images in a dream may be the way we unconsciously pictorialise our flux of feelings and the play of internal energy flows. For instance love or sexual drive can give rise to physical movement – as in sexual intercourse. Repression of sex or love also represses such physical movements, leading to tension and conflict, which might be presented in the drama of a dream.

Example: ‘I was with my wife, walking along a street, on holiday with her. But I felt awful tension. It was the sort of stress I feel when I have turned off my sexual flow – as I have at the moment.’ Brian V.

Brian can easily see the connection between the dream feelings and his everyday life. Making such connections may take practice. But the situation could as easily be expressed as a dream image of a blocked river. The underlying feelings would then be less easy to grasp.

Example: ‘I was in a very ancient crumbling building, confronted by a large stone door, deeply engraved with many designs and creatures. I began to open the door and felt high feelings of anxiety. I realised this was an initiation and I must calm my feelings in order to pass beyond the door. i.e. if I were controlled by my feelings I would run away.’ Derek F.

How we meet the emotions in our dreams illustrates our habitual method of dealing with them. The feelings of anxiety in Derek’s dream were met and moved beyond, but this is unusual. This is because most of us change our direction as soon as there is a hint of fear. The amount of nicotine and alcohol human beings consume suggests how poorly we meet anxiety, considering that both these drugs inhibit feelings, and thereby deaden anxiety. Going beyond fear or pain is an initiation which opens doors for us. We might now apply for the job; ask for the date; raise the issue; express the creativity; make the journey abroad, which anxiety previously kept us from. We see this in the next example.

Example: ‘I had a ring on my marriage finger. It was a thin band of gold. I woke up frightened. Angela LBC.

Angela is not married and feels obvious anxiety about the commitment.

Dreams give us a safe area to express emotions which might be difficult or dangerous to release socially. Anger in a dream may be expressing what we failed to discharge in a waking encounter, or it might be our habitual response. It may also be directed against oneself, causing illness or tension.

Dreams also contain many positive emotions. Sometimes they present a new aspect of feeling which is life enhancing. In the example below the dreamer overcomes the feeling of defeat and death, and in imagery expresses a sense of rebirth.

Example: While heavily pregnant 11 years ago I dreamt I and thousands of Japanese-like soldiers had been at war and lost. Our punishment was beheading. Not wanting to see my comrades killed I went to the front. I felt the cold blade hit my neck, then was dead, outside my body. Dressed in golden armour with a lion symbol I told my comrades they outnumbered the enemy. They won and took my baby from my dead body. BMW – Southport.

Some feeling states in a dream are subtle, and may be more evident in terms of the symbols than the feelings. A grey drear environment suggests depression and lack of pleasure. A sunny light environment with flowers and colour shows pleasure and good feelings. A country landscape depicts quite a different feeling state to a smoky busy city street. We can define these for ourselves using the techniques described under Secrets of Power Dreaming

Whatever feelings or emotions we meet in our dreams, many of them are bound to be habitual responses we have to life. Where these habits are negative we can begin to change them by working with the dream images.

Here is a man’s description of the sort of emotions felt in exploring a dream.