Bad Dreams Are Good for You

Our dreams baffle us, and researchers since Freud have been trying to figure them out. Decades later, no one's been much the wiser, it seems.

Now, research reported today suggests that the run-of-the-mill bad dreams — and apparently most of our dreams are kind of bad — are actually good for your brain.

Bad dreams allow us to process and regulate the day's emotions during REM sleep, when dreams occur, according to research detailed at Health24.com. These dreams are commonly filled with bizarre and possibly scary images, which allow us to dispel fears.

These dreams differ from nightmares, which are bad dreams that wake you up. Nightmares reveal a problem in emotional processing, the researchers wrote in the April 15 issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Waking up from a nightmare is a relief, study author Ross Levin of Yeshiva University told Health24.com, but it may serve to reinforce the feeling that the threat was real. About 85 percent of us have one nightmare a year, according to the Web site.