We’ve all had some sort of nightmare at some point in our lives, maybe when we were kids and crawled between our parents seconds after waking up from a bad dream or maybe as an student or adult who just had a bad night. For me, I usually don’t remember what I even dreamed about the next day but few days ago I had one of the most realistic and scariest nightmares I’ve ever had. To summarize it, my dream was at my own dorm, me talking normally to my roommate and I suddenly fell like my blanket was covering my head and I fell really slowly on the floor, everything became really slow and my body couldn’t move, I heard screaming noises behind my back and I even tried screaming for help to my roommate. Nothing work, I felt I was going to die, then immediately I woke up breathing really deeply and sweating and I panicked as I woke up feeling really disoriented. I felt confused, nervous and scared at the same time until I realized it was just a bad dream. This had me thinking for a while so I decided to investigate why or what causes our mind to create such bad dreams.

According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) young children experience nightmares, with an estimated 10 percent to 50 percent between the ages of 5 and 12 years. Surprisingly for adults this changes, only 2-8 percent of adults encounters with bad dreams and nightmares. But what is the difference between a bad dream and a nightmare? A new study by two psychologist Genieve and Antonio Zadra at the University of Montreal analyzes that basically nightmares are disturbing dreams that actually wake you up and the awakening is directly involved into what was going on in the nightmare. This is precisely what happened to me as I mentioned previously as I woke up really distressed. A bad dream can also be very perturbing but you sleep normally and you wake up normally. The researchers asked their volunteer participant test subjects to evaluate the magnitude of the emotions they experience within their dreams.  After analyzing what the volunteers had written, the researchers found that nightmares came out to be much more emotionally intense than bad dreams overall.

Also, according to the study, most of the people are inclined to say that fear is completely connected with bad dreams and nightmares but this is not always the case. While fear does drive a majority of nightmares and bad dreams, Zadra  says that about 35% of the nightmares and 50% of the bad dreams of the 10,000 they studied contained other primary emotions such as sadness, confusion, guilt, anger, disgust, and others.

Lauri Quinn Loewemberg, a professional dream analyst states that bad dreams and nightmares is part of a thinking process. “The nightmare is when we are thinking about difficult issues during Rapid Eye Movement (REM)  and trying to sort them out. We often try to ignore our difficult issues with distractions during the day but when we are asleep and are forced to be alone in our own heads, these difficult issues will be addressed,” Lauri Quinn says. There are other factors that might have a strong effect in the creation of nightmares and bad dreams. Some of these include:

• Anxiety and Stress: Anxiety and stress, often as the result of a traumatic life event, are sometimes the cause of nightmares and bad dreams. Stress in school or at work can cause these.
• Spicy Foods: The International journal of Psychology released a small study where a group of healthy men eat spicy meals before bed on some evenings and compared their quality of sleep on nights where they had non-spiced meals. On the spicy nights, the subjects spent more time awake and had poorer quality sleep. The explanation is that spicy food can elevate body temperatures and thus disrupt sleep.
• Alcohol: Excess consumption can also lead to nightmares and bad sleep since alcohol is depressant drug.
• Illness: Illnesses that include fever, such as the flu, can often trigger nightmares. And other sleeping disorders, including apnea and narcolepsy, may also increase the incidence of bad dreams and nightmares.

But what about us college students? We undergo a lot of stress, anxiety, we consume alcohol, some maybe drugs. Several studies have found that bad dreams and nightmares are mostly inclined by personality type and that someone who has experienced some kind of trauma are more likely to experience these. A study published found that 47% of college students had at least one nightmare in a two-week study. Also, another study published in 2014 showed that blind people are four times more likely to have a nightmare than those with vision. he study confirmed the nightmares were associated with emotions the blind experience while awake, such as the potential of embarrassing social situations like spilling a cup of coffee.

http://www.medicaldaily.com/bad-dream-more-just-dream-science-nightmares-327586

http://www.medicaldaily.com/blind-peoples-nightmares-product-intense-negative-emotion-while-awake-306533

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2307768

http://www.aasmnet.org/resources/factsheets/nightmareparasom.pdfhttp://www.lauriloewenberg.com/book-dream-on-it

http://www.medicaldaily.com/top-ten-foods-induce-insomnia-

245486http://www.divinecaroline.com/self/dreams/six-reasons-we-have-bad-dreams

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140128094143.htm

http://blogs.voanews.com/science-world/2014/01/31/new-canadian-study-analyzes-nightmares-and-bad-dreams/

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Antonio_Zadra

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep

http://www.iupsys.net/publications/journal/

http://vadlo.com/Research_Cartoons/PI-nightmares.gif