Many women report having nightmares a few days before their period starts. Researchers have found out why this is the case.
You have just been slumbering peacefully, then your beautiful dream suddenly turns into a nightmare scene and you wake up bathed in sweat. The next day you look at the calendar – and suddenly you realize why you are constantly being plagued by nightmares. Your period is coming! In fact, when asked, many women say that in the days leading up to the days they not only suffer from the annoying PMS, but also increasingly have bad dreams. But why is that?
Dream once, please!
Indeed, science has a plausible explanation for this question. To find out why period nightmares arise, take a look at the various stages of sleep. To be more precise: the REM phase ("Rapid Eye Movement"), because that is the phase in which we dream. Our eyes roll back and forth under the lids and our blood pressure is increased. Those who sleep for about eight hours are in the REM phase for about two hours of that. If we wake up during this, we can most likely remember what we dreamed.
It's all a question of hormones
Dr. Irshaad Ebrahim of the London Sleep Center told the online magazine Broadly: "In the week before your period starts, women have less REM sleep because their progesterone levels are increased". Overall, we dream less during periods, but wake up more often due to hormonal changes in the body – and are more likely to remind us of our dreams.
Gynecologist and author Dr. Christiane Northrup also assumes that the physical changes that the monthly cycle brings with it can also be part of our dreams. According to the gynecologist, for example, many women report recurring dreams in which something breaks or breaks. This could indicate that the lining of the uterus is being shed from the body (that is to say, "breaks" or "breaks") and is eliminated with some menstrual blood.
And what am I supposed to do now?
Anyone who dreams badly for several nights in a row often feels worn out. Fortunately, we are not completely at the mercy of our dreams! If we notice that our nightmares are triggered by the period or the hormonal chaos in our body, we can test the following methods: to scare them away:
- Talk about: Sounds banal, but it actually helps. Bad dreams often lose some of their horror when we tell others about them.
- Self help: The point is to find a coping strategy for the nightmare yourself. First, you should write down the dream in as much detail as possible and deal with it. Then you think about how you could transform the dream so that it causes less fear. For example, if you are being persecuted in a nightmare, you can imagine confronting the persecutor and confronting him. Now you imagine that for at least two weeks every day for five to ten minutes.
- Cognitive behavior therapy: If you are stuck on your own, you can also seek help from a psychotherapist and work with him to find possible coping strategies. These are also trained in so-called imagination exercises.
- Lucid dreaming: Also known as "lucid dreams". The person concerned knows that he is dreaming and can thereby influence the dream in his favor. Most people have a lucid dream at some point, but in order to be able to change dreams again and again, persistent training is necessary. To do this, you ask yourself about ten times a day whether you are dreaming or awake. However, it can take several months before you can then automatically ask yourself this question in your dream and thus influence it.
Do you have any more questions about your period? Here you can find out what spotting instead of periods means, what severe abdominal pain stands for, what a heavy menstrual period means and what causes menstrual cramps can be.
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