Inverse - 🧠 Your brain on nightmares

Wednesday

Nov 30 2022

If you've ever had a nightmare, you know how real they can feel. That's regardless of the bizarre circumstances they seem to place you in. It's likely that these fantastical dreams have been terrorizing us in our sleep since as long as humans have been around. But for some people, nightmares are more than an annoying occurrence, happening so frequently that they seem to take over your life. Doctors diagnose this as nightmare disorder, and it's more common than you might think: About 4 percent of adults experience the symptoms of nightmare disorder.

But over the last several years, researchers around the world have been investigating new ways to combat these dreams. Along the way, they've identified key reasons why we get these terrors in the first place. With these tools, we might finally be able to quell the monster under our beds to good. Read today's sleep week story below. You can find the rest of the sleep week stories here.

What's New

Future of Sleep

Mind and Body

Nightmares have plagued humans for millennia — do we finally know how to tame them?

It all started with a talking cockroach. “I could hear its mouth clicking as it talked, and feel its legs scratching me,” Kristina Wallace writes to Inverse about the first nightmare she can recall. She was 4. By 6, she started wondering why nobody else was afraid to fall asleep. Bad dreams still plague her now, at age 32.

Dreams represent the most elusive parts of our minds, arranging all the sensory information we take in while awake into adventures that range from dramatically mundane to bafflingly horrific. Among dreaming’s potential purposes is to take all the detritus in our brain, hash it out in one big fantastical imagined orgy, and get on with our lives.

Nightmares, the worst types of dreams, are a part of ourselves, which is an even scarier notion than the dream itself. “Dreams are internally generated,” psychiatry professor Rafael Pelayo at Stanford University tells Inverse. “They represent your thoughts and your fears. You’re basically being scared of something you made yourself.” The outside world may supply nightmare fuel, but it’s our psyche that assembles the wretched fantasy.

Sponsored

Audi

New holiday tradition: plug into a better future

Ah, holiday tech traditions: connecting to grandma’s ethernet port, going on an early-morning replacement phone charger run, and helping dad set up the smart TV (again). This time, ring in the new year with technology that brings a sense of optimism. With over 100 years of experience on the cutting edge, Audi has been manufacturing vehicles for premium mobility since day one. Fully electric motors housed in an elegant design rivals any family heirloom: That’s what makes Audi instantly recognizable.

This year, combine the automotive name you know and trust with the premium features you dream of finding under the tree.

Explore Audi today

Review

Movies

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a dark and twisted masterpiece

Guillermo del Toro and Pinocchio are a match made in heaven. One is our greatest teller of disobedient fairytales. The other is the original fairytale lesson on the perils of disobedience. Put them together in a visually stunning stop-motion movie (set in war-torn fascist Italy) and you get a bewitching animated masterwork that’s one of the best movies of 2022.

Read our review

Data

Gear

Why Spotify Wrapped should be all year round

Spotify Wrapped, the streaming service’s regular end-of-the-year review of everything you listened to, is one of the more surprising cultural moments to rise out of the 2010s. Spotify repackages data it collected on you in an interactive story (in the Snapchat sense) with a playlist, but it’s become a critical feature for all streaming services — a meme, marketing opportunity, and way to hold onto subscribers into the new year all wrapped into one.

Apple Music and YouTube Music recently launched their latest takes on the idea, and what was apparent before is clearer than ever — the year-in-review needs to become an all-year affair, a permanent change to the relationship between users and the data companies collect on them.

Ouchie

Innovation

This smart bandage does the work of a doctor

For thousands of years, bandages have proved an essential component of any first aid kit. They’ve certainly saved countless lives by staunching bleeding and warding off infection. But these dressings can be a double-edged sword: If they’re not properly cared for, they can allow a wound to fester as bacteria builds up beneath its gauzy surface.

But what if a bandage could tell you what’s happening inside a wound in real time? Or even treat an infection? That’s the idea behind a new wireless smart bandage developed by an international group of researchers, according to a new study published in Nature.

Look!

Science

New Hubble image displays a dazzling disco ball of stars

Thousands of stars, clumped together in a dazzling ball of light, sparkle brightly in this Hubble Space Telescope image.

Hubble recently pointed its instruments at Prismis 26, a globular cluster 23,000 light years away, near the bright bulge of stars around the center of our galaxy. A globular cluster is exactly what it sounds like: a group of stars whose mutual gravitational pull holds them together in a densely-packed sphere, orbiting a shared center.

Take a closer look

Meanwhile...

If Elon Musk made a smartphone, it would absolutely sell out

The NASA Artemis I mission is halfway done

Namor could get the same MCU treatment as the Hulk, producer reveals

Ellen Ripley deserved better than 'Alien Resurrection'

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Inverse - 🧠 Your brain on nightmares

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