Nightmares+ZW

1. What does it mean to be "gainfully" employed (line 3)? He was doing well for himself, put things in his past behind. 2. Look up the word "Damoclesian". What does it mean that the knife dangled with "Damoclesian contempt"? It was an ever present-evil 3. What did the patient fear at night (2 things)? the intruder being his mom and the dangling knife 4. How did Dr. Leving help this man? Dr. Levin to him to reframe the dream and rehearse alternatives to swinging blades and frozen fear, until finally the nightmares abated and the man could regain his footing 5. When is the last time you had a nightmare you remember? Do you mind sharing it? If not, please do so here... The last time i had a nightmare was about a month ago. I dreamed the me and my brother were going to store when out of no where come two men with guns and they tell me to duck...my brother was killed and then they shot me but i didnt die. And in my brother's voice i heard "why'd you duck" over and over again 6. What does she mean when she calls nightmares a "sensorily rich nocturnal roundhouse staffed with characters so persuasive you want to ... strangle them, before they can strangle you."? (paragraph 4) It just shows how real dreams/nightmares seem to all humans. 7. What percentage of dreams are bad dreams? about 75% 8. What is REM sleep? (You may need to look this up.) What does it stand for? What happens during REM sleep? How much REM sleep do we get in a typical night's sleep? Rapid Eye Movement sleep. In REM sleep the brain is active when the body is inactive. This is normally when dreams/nightmares occur. You need to typically get about 1.5 hours of REM sleep a night 9. How much time do we spend dreaming each night? people spend about 3 hours dreaming per night 10. How does the frequency of nightmares change as we age? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep
 * A NYT article on Nightmares by my favorite author, Natalie Angier**
 * ~ Age ||~ (Average total number of hours sleeping per day ||
 * Newborn || 18 ||
 * 1 month || 15–16 ||
 * 3 months || 15 ||
 * 6 months || 14–15 ||
 * 9 months || 14 ||
 * 1 year || 13–14 ||
 * 2 years || 13 ||
 * 3 years || 12 ||
 * 4 years || 11 1/2 ||
 * 5 years || 11 ||
 * 6 years || 11 ||
 * 7 years || 10 ||
 * 8 years || 10 ||
 * 9 years || 9-10 ||
 * 15 years || 8 ||

11. Which parts of the brain are active during dreaming?

12. What is the possible function of bad dreams? And why are nightmares disfunctional? Ordinary bad dreams rarely recapitulate unpleasant events from real life but instead cannibalize them for props and spare parts, and through that reinvention, Dr. Nielsen explained, the fears are defanged. “A bad dream that doesn’t lead to awakening is successful in dealing with intense emotion,” he said. “It’s disturbing, but there is some kind of resolution to the extent we don’t wake up.”

By this scenario, nightmares, in allowing you to escape prematurely, represent a failure of the “fear extinction” system. “Bad dreams are functional, nightmares dysfunctional,” he said.