Didn’t know where else to post this, but in irc we were talking about the possibility of nightmares being passed onto children. It’s hard to say because the person that was posing the idea was speaking of their one year old, and so the intensity of the child’s crying is what made the mother believe the child was having nightmares. As for myself, my father has frequent night terrors (even though he’s old now o.o), and I have suffered frequent nightmares all my life. Does anyone else think that perhaps the nightmare trait can be passed down through genes? Or perhaps it’s something we sympathetically gained as babies from being around our parents enough to know their sleep patterns. What do you guys think?
I don’t think it’s passed down by genes, as, dreams are effectively a recollection of day’s events along with more long-term happenings (recurring dreams). Constant nightmares can show something else, stressful life for example.
Yeah, they do show show stressful life, but most people will say they’ve had a load of incoherent/not meaning anything nightmares in their life. I know I use to as a child. I think sleeping in close proximity of parents when young might also cause these things. It’s well known “kids don’t do what you say, but they do what you do”, and babies are highly perceptive to their parents emotions. I don’t think they stop being perceptive of them until they’re about 5ish. Does anyone else think that children gain their parents occurring nightmare traits or just me? o.o
It’s also like, I use to cry in my sleep. But I have a cousin who laughs in his sleep, and another that grinds her teeth. Perhaps I just picked up my dad’s habit, but I don’t think so because I can’t recall being consciously aware of his night terrors until the age of about 11, and by that time I had many nightmares throughout my short life.
My parents don’t really remember their dreams or care to. My mom thinks she doesn’t dream for the most part, but I had nightmares a lot when I was little. I’ve no clue about my biological mother, but I do know she had epilepsy issues since she’d been little. I wouldn’t know anything about her dreams, though… Didn’t see her from the age of 5 until last year, when I saw her once before she died (and at that point she was barely conscious at some points).
I do know I would miss my nightmares if they disappeared though… Call me strange?
I think I understand the missing the nightmares. I actually do at the moment, to be honest there the most realistic, easy to remember and easy to interpret. But yeah, perhaps the tendency to have nightmares is picked up psychologically when we’re babies dealing with our parents stress around us. Some people might just say their family never had stress when they were babies but who knows, taking care of a baby is stress unto itself. And perhaps the people who use to have them frequently just never grew out of them… Hmmm.