Holiday Dreams Or Holiday Nightmares? — Why You're Having Weird Dreams
What to find the meanings of YOUR holiday dreams?
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Ahhh, the holidays.
The holidays are a time of togetherness and joy, but can also bring on anxiety, loneliness, and even despair. And all these extreme emotions can be jumbled up together into one confusing alphabet soup.
These emotions can bubble over and it can be a challenge to keep a lid on them.
When you picture sitting around the table at a family holiday meal, do you:
See your favorite holiday foods as a comforting veil over the gathering? You can almost taste the tender prime rib and the smell of fresh homemade rolls that makes all right with the world.
Or, feel the weight of the stress tightening your chest? Finding gifts — and the money to pay for them, enduring family bickering, rehashing of conflicts, or the same disparaging comments you heard as an awkward teenager makes it hard to breathe.
Likely it’s both! Be gentle with yourself, friend, it’s normal.
The holiday season and such gatherings are inherently emotionally charged.
It’s a time where we revisit our roots, reawaken childhood memories — in both joyful and painful ways (According to the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, 78% of children reported more than 1 traumatic experience before the age of 5) — and come face to face with ourselves at our deep-down core.
This is the reason our holiday dreams can get so wild and intense. It’s your mind’s way of processing conflict, regulating your emotional response to it, and building mental resilience.
Your dreams are valuable to your personal growth and you’ve got the power to set yourself up for sleep and dream success by analyzing your weird dreams and applying the real meaning to your waking life.
We’re gonna hit the high notes of why you’re having vivid dreams during the holidays and what you can do about it:
How Irregularity Whips Up Weird Holiday Dreams
When Life Gets Intense, Your Dreams Get Intense
Your Holiday Environment Influences Your Holiday Dreams
The Holidays can be Lonely
Your Sleep Quality Affects Your Dreams
5 Tips to Manage Your Holiday Sleep + Your Holiday Dreams
Leverage Your Holiday Dreams
Irregularity Whips Up Weird Holiday Dreams
The holidays bring on significant disruption from our routines. It’s often a welcome change, but it still brings on irregularity. Even if the holidays have been magical, have you found yourself longing for the beginning of January and craving your routine?
Excitement, festivities, and family time, while fun, still take a mental and energy toll, whereas your routine feels comfortable and you feel in control.
When your life is irregular, your dreams become irregular too. But that’s not a negative thing.
Your subconscious needs space.
"When we are away from our busy daily lives, perhaps on holiday or on a retreat, there is more room for the unconscious to speak, and this is when the dreams change." —- Dr. Dwight Turner, UKCP Psychotherapist
When Life Gets Intense, Your Dreams Get Intense
A familiar yet irregular environment causes stress — travel, buying gifts, seeing family for the 1st time in a long while can all create tension.
If you’re one of the 70% of Americans who had to skip traveling to see family during the 2020 holiday season due to the pandemic, visiting your family for the 1st time in a couple of years means there is so much more for your psyche to process.
Former trauma bubbles to the surface when you step back into your past and family dynamics.
And these issues WILL resurface in your dreams.
After not living there, being in your childhood home can bring up deep-rooted feelings that surprise you and influence your dreams. (Are you literally sleeping in your childhood bed and staring at the same old walls with those posters you taped up as a teen? No wonder you’ve got some serious feels happening!)
You may feel overwhelmed when you’re flooded by thoughts and feelings from your teen years that you weren’t fully aware of or had long forgotten.
And all of a sudden, those memories and emotions are running wild in your dreams. The cool thing is now you can process them from a place of maturity and acquired wisdom.
Write this down, say it out loud, and commit it to memory — Rehashing old unprocessed emotions is a G.O.O.D. thing.
**Need help processing your emotions and analyzing your dreams? The Wakefully app can help you find the true meaning of your dreams and give you tips on applying them to your life. AND it’s available to help you handle your holiday dreams now.
Your Holiday Environment Influences Your Holiday Dreams
Your environment around the holidays will impact your holiday dreams.
The familiar sounds, tastes, and yes, even the smells around the holidays may cause you to have bizarre, vivid dreams.
2008 research at the University Hospital Mannheim in Germany discovered real-life odors affected how subjects emotionally rated their dreams. Just as the study participants entered into the dreaming state of sleep, the researchers administered a shot of a scent — either rotten eggs (gross) or roses.
Here’s what happened.
When the subjects smelled roses, they recalled more pleasant dreams. The subjects who unknowingly smelled rotten eggs reported negative dreams.
So, when you go back to your family home, there will be familiar smells that’ll take you back to your childhood in a hot minute. That favorite casserole bubbling in the oven, the smell wafting through the house, will make your mouth water and your memories come alive.
And those memories might just make their way into your holiday dreams.
The Holidays Can Be Lonely
Holidays highlight both connection and loneliness — that’s some profound conflicting feelings to process in our dreams.
Loneliness was on the rise long before the pandemic hit. A 2021 Telstra Talking Loneliness reported in 1 in 2 Gen Z (54%), and Millennials (51%) claimed to regularly feeling lonely. That’s significantly more than any other generation.
Many people spend the holidays alone — they can’t get to their family (or visa versa), or they may have suffered a loss which fosters further loneliness.
Let’s just address the elephant in the room.
↠ We’ve all felt the negative impact of the pandemic and most of us will carry some emotional scars for a while. Being forced into isolation and torn apart from the people we most love means our default emotional load is heavier than ever. ↞
Your life will probably look different in some way from here on out. For example, stats on adults reporting anxiety and depression jumped 30% after Covid.
But you know what? You’re not meant to “get over” all negative feelings. Some you just need to hold space for. It’s ok to feel sadness as much as joy, you’re not “doing it wrong”.
All of your emotions are valid and essential to living your life with purpose and meaning.
Loneliness triggers stress, and stress causes emotions to bubble up. Almost every holiday commercial shows large, happy families gathered around a table or in front of a Christmas tree, and that can make the sting of loneliness even harsher.
Feelings of rejection or abandonment can resurface around this time of year, giving our holiday dreams a lot more to process. So be prepared for it and accept it.
Think of dreams as overnight therapy.
“The dream stage of sleep, based on its unique neurochemical composition, provides us with a form of overnight therapy, a soothing balm that removes the sharp edges from the prior day’s emotional experiences,” said Matthew Walker, Ph.D. neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley.
The holidays can also invoke introspective time — the idea of going back in your emotional life. While at a family gathering that’s bringing up all the feels, have you ever been asked, “Why are you acting like you’re #!@ 15 again?”
Your Sleep Quality Affects Your Dreams
The holidays are busy — no doubt about it or way around it.
The stress of traveling, buying the right gifts within your budget, and spending time with family and friends attempting to please EVERYONE turns into a pressure cooker for your emotions and can wreak havoc on your sleep.
Travel can affect your sleep patterns as well — jumping time zones and the environmental stressors of travel can take a toll on your sleep quality.
You already know that stress affects your sleep. For example, higher levels of stress can cause an increase in REM sleep, which may lead to more weird, vivid dreams.
REM (Rapid Eye Movement) is the sleep stage where most dreaming takes place. According to the National Sleep Foundation, REM sleep plays a leading role in helping your brain organize and process new info.
This info is then stored in your long-term memory. REM sleep also helps mental concentration and mood regulation, 2 critical components to your daily work performance and overall quality of life.
"Dreams during REM sleep are often bizarre, vivid, or whimsical, and are often tied to emotions," says Stephanie Stahl, MD, a sleep medicine physician at Indiana University Health.
5 Tips to Manage Your Holiday Sleep + Your Holiday Dreams
With all the irregularities of the holidays, there are still ways to take good care of yourself and set yourself up for sleep & dream success.
1. Practice a bedtime routine
Be consistent with your bedtime routine to give your body the cue it’s time to wind down. In your routine, to help manage your dreams, try dream incubation — as you get ready to fall asleep, think about a problem that needs solving or an unresolved conflict.
2. Don’t talk money before settling in to sleep
The holidays can expand your waistline and shrink your bank account. With all the holiday prep and gift-giving, finances can be a stressful topic, and talking money right before bed can add unnecessary stress. Set aside a specific time during the day to set a holiday spending budget and have a money convo.
3. Cut off the booze a few hours before bed
Holiday festivities lend themselves to spiked eggnog, holiday-themed cocktails, and loads of other alcohol — usually, way too much of it. While a drink before bed can help you fall asleep, it’ll disrupt the sleep cycle later. Fitful, fractured sleep will leave you drained, depleted, and worn out.
4. Move your body
Exercise is a known stress reliever. Moving your body for 30 minutes a day, especially during the holidays, will help you sleep and put a lid on rising anxiety. If you’re not big into exercise, try yoga or a short walk in the sunlight.
5. Practice mindfulness
Being mindful about your thought patterns and intentional about more positive, constructive thinking, particularly during the holidays, can help squash stress and anxiety and help you sleep. Paying attention to your emotions and processing those feelings can keep things from getting pushed down only to pop up in your holiday dreams.
**A great time and place to practice mindfulness is right as you wake up by reflecting on your dreams, emotions, and sensations. Dream therapy can help you unearth buried emotions surfacing in your dreams but about your waking life.
Dreams are simply a dramatization and reenactment of your thoughts, beliefs, concerns, and wishes — dreams are the theatre of your mind.
Leverage Your Holiday Dreams
The holidays can be fabulous, lonely, stressful, and packed with meaning. And it’s not always either/or, the holidays can be all 4 swirling together like snowflakes.
And that goes double for your holiday dreams.
But you can use those weird, vivid holiday dreams to your advantage by analyzing what your subconscious is trying to tell you and then applying it to your waking life.
You have the power to leverage your dreams.
Need a guide to help process and determine the meaning of your weird or intense dreams around this holiday season? Download the Wakefully app today.