Scientists still don’t really understand why we dream.
And while the function of dreamworlds for now still alludes us, the process of having
a nightmare is largely linked to deeper psychological issues, like anxiety, stress and mental health
in general.
Nightmares are, by definition, horrible places to be… but luckily after a few hours, we
can wake up and forget the horror we were privy to.
What if things weren’t as simple than that?
What if they were a reality?
Hello and welcome back to spooktober here on Life’s Biggest Questions – the channel
that looks to answer a plethora of queries from science, space, history, pop culture,
politics and a heady dose of What Ifs.
I am your host Rebecca Felgate and today I am asking what if your nightmares were real?
Before we get into this scare fest I want to ask you guys what nightmares you most regularly
have?
For me, I regularly dream my teeth are falling out…
it is just so convincing every time… and I always end up spitting them out one at a
time into the sink, or dreaming that I keep trying to shove them back into my gums.
IT IS HORRIBLE.
Anyway, let me know yours and hopefully we can have a good chat about it!
While you are down there lurking in the comments section, why don’t you hit the thumbs up
button on this video.
So.
What would nightmares being real look like?
I guess it means that each and every time you slip into the comfort of your bed, you
fall through to a parallel world where spitting out your entire set of teeth at once can happen,
you are regularly chased by some ominous force, clowns want to kill you, spiders are trying
to crawl into your eyes, you are being buried alive or falling from a building.
Night after night, you would experience a new horror.
The question is – when we say real, do we mean we are absolved of consequence when we
wake up, or, for example, all my teeth actually be missing?
If so…
like… dental is expensive, would we need to get nightmare insurance?
What would happen if we did fall off a building in our nightmares?
Would we actually die, or would we wake up with broken bones?
Would we need paramedics close by at all times?
If our nightmares were real and had wakeful consequences, injury and death rates would
go way up?
If nightmares were real, would there be 7.5 billion parallel universes for everyone on
the planet; our own personal nightmare realties, or would it be like one nightmarish dimension?
When you see your friends and family in your nightmare, will you be part of theirs too?
Would our nightmares interact?
Will I be walking into a room naked to see a bunch of people I actually work with?
Will my friend Ruth actually metamorphosize into a bee with no way of communicating to
the people trying to swat her?
Will Caroline actually be being chased by a wolf?
Are we assigned to our own personal dramas or are we in this nightmareland together.
Another question for you – often people have nightmares that their significant others
are cheating on them…would this mean they actually have been adulterous, or do they
have no control over their actions?
If we commit crimes in nightmares, are we responsible for them?
I suppose the answer here does really depend on control.
At the moment we have control over what we do when we are conscious, but seemingly no
control over the sub conscious.
If nightmares were real, I guess the truly worrying thing would be that we are exposed
to all of our worst fears without the ability to actually do anything about the worse case
scenario situations we find ourselves in.
Perhaps we would develop the ability to lucid dream?
Lucid dreaming is explored in the movie, Inception and is basically where you are aware you are
in a dream state and can control what you do.
A lot of people say they are able to do this, it is pretty prevalent in Tibetan Buddhism,
but I am told it is a hard skill to acquire.
If nightmares were real, perhaps we would be taught to Lucid dream from an early age
to help protect us in the unconscious planes.
We could dwell for hours on what on earth would happen in these nightmare planes, so
lets move on to how real nightmares would change the waking world.
If Nightmares were real, the state of our mental health would be in serious jeopardy.
Those who already suffer from PTSD would have hellish lives, and perhaps we would all start
blending the two realities – unsure of what was real and not.
If horrific crimes, like beings stalked or murdered, are committed in our dreams …would
crime rates sore in real life?
The world wide economy would likely suffer – if every time you had a bad dream and
the events were for all intent and purpose, real, how would we ever go to school or work?
Wouldn’t we all be afraid to go to sleep?
Would we try and deprive ourselves of sleep so we never had to risk having a nightmare?
Wouldn’t that send us all mad?
Sleep deprivation experiments of the past tell us if we don’t sleep for three or more
days, our health suffers immensely.
Would our waking lives then become nightmares, in which case, what would be the point on
avoiding sleep.
Perhaps in order to avoid total insanity, we would take a number of short naps every
day – avoiding falling into REM, which is when we dream.
Even then we would become sleep deprived and irritable in our waking lives.
Perhaps the best way to tackle the issue of dreams being real would be to try to get to
the bottom of why we have nightmares.
Perhaps we would all being seeing therapists to try and work through our waking life issues.
Perhaps we would all need to actively destress before bed.
Maybe we would sleep in safety pods that soothed us before sleep and monitored our brain waves
and heart rate when we are unconscious.
Perhaps if we showed signs of stress while sleeping, the pods could have some kind of
alarm to wake us up and pull us out of danger?
A world in which nightmares are real would be a very, very different place.
Cheese sales would be in decline, scary movies, shows and books would be banned…
Halloween would not be tolerated…anything that could trigger us in our sleep would not
be tolerated – it would just be too dangerous.
We would live in a kind of faux cotton candy dreamland, and that sounds creepy but maybe
Further questions are – if nightmares are real, would dreams be real too?
What is this absurdist astral plane we find ourselves floating through and what is it
about being unconscious that makes it accesible?
If nightmares are real, would we create some kind of drug to stop us dreaming?
Do we NEED dreams and nightmares?
So many things to think about… good job we are a channel that loves a question!
SO, I think we will leave this one here for now – but before we go I wanted to tell
you that if you like this video, you will probably enjoy our video – What do Nightmares
Mean, - if you click the card right now then you can watch it.
Did you guys like this video, what would you do if your nightmares were real?
Don’t forget to let me know what your most common nightmares are?
Also while you are down there, why don’t you like this video and share it with a friend.
Thank you for watching this video!
I am your host Rebecca Felgate, I’ll catch you next time, but until then….make sure
you stay curious, stay alert and never ever stop questioning.