The only thing worse than a bad dream is the same bad dream over and over.
I know that from personal experience, and if you’re reading it, I’m sorry to say that you probably do too. Just so you know, you’re not alone. Research shows that between 2-6% of adults experience weekly nightmares. Hardly anyone talks about them, but a lot of people are having them.
Don’t worry though, there’s good news. Recurring nightmares happen for a specific reason, and they are treatable.
Why dreams repeat in the first place
I just finished reading When Brains Dream, and their theory (based on a lot of research) is that dreams in general help us process and integrate all kinds of memories. In lab tests for example, participants would try to solve a maze task for twenty minutes, then stop and sleep. Upon waking the participants showed marked improvement with the task.
Similarly, sleep can help us recover from trauma. Antonia Zadra and Robert Stickgold, who wrote When Brains Dream, proposed that dreaming about traumatic events helps us cope with them. There’s a process where dreams go from literal re-enactments of a traumatic event, to more and more abstract over time. Eventually the trauma becomes more symbolic and less intense. This ideally leads to a resolution of the trauma and a return to stable function for the dreamer.
As we know, not everything in life is ideal. This is true in dreaming, too.
When the process gets stuck
Some people—especially those with PTSD—have difficulty progressing through this cycle fully. Instead of processing the trauma in their sleep, the trauma goes into stasis. It is very common for those with PTSD to experience a real-to-life nightmare in which they see their trauma unfold almost identically to how it happened originally. In some cases there are changes, but for the most part, these dreams are basically trauma flashbacks.
If you or someone you love are experiencing this, my heart truly goes out to you. Any kind of trauma is bad enough to experience once, but being locked into a simulation of this every night is horrible. Nightmares also cause poor sleep, stress, and a variety of other symptoms. This stress can carry into the day, and many nightmare sufferers dread sleep in a way that turns something restorative into something awful.
The research gives this a name you may find useful: nightmares that begin as trauma responses can become habit-sustained over time. That distinction matters, because habits can be changed. The nightmare is no longer just a symptom of what happened to you — it has become a learned pattern that your brain keeps running. That’s actually good news, because learned patterns can be unlearned.
So why does the same dream keep coming back?
The short answer is that your brain is trying to process something it hasn’t been able to finish processing. Each time the nightmare runs, it activates the fear memory — but the way nightmares work, they end before any resolution can happen. You wake up frightened, which reinforces the idea that the threat is real and ongoing. So the dream comes back and tries again. And again.
It’s a loop, not a life sentence. And there are very powerful techniques that can help break it. Studies have shown that they’re even effective for those with PTSD.
What you can do about it
While there are methods for stopping nightmares, it’s important that they’re accessible to you and in a format that can keep you engaged and practicing them. Studies also show that repeated engagement with these techniques is the key to long-term success with reducing nightmare intensity and duration.
I’ve put together a framework called R.E.S.T. that walks through the process step by step — from reframing what nightmares are, to tracking them, to building better responses, to transforming the script itself. You can read about it here.
I really hope you feel better soon.