Does your child have regular nightmares? Then maybe you need to read this.

What is a nightmare?

A nightmare is a dream occurring during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep that results in feelings of strong terror, fear, distress or extreme anxiety.

Nightmares tend to occur in the latter part of the night and oftentimes awakens the sleeper, who is likely to recall the content of the dream.

Nightmares usually begin in childhood before age 10 and are considered normal unless they significantly interfere with sleep, development or psychosocial development. They also tend to be more common in girls than boys, and they may continue into adulthood.

What does this new research say?

New research by a team from the University of Warwick suggests that having regular nightmares during childhood may be an early warning sign of psychotic disorders in adolescence.

They studied 6,796 children, with slightly more girls than boys. The children’s nightmares were recorded and reported by parents.

They noticed that the children reporting frequent nightmares before the age of 12 were three and a half times more likely to suffer from psychotic experiences in early adolescence. Also having nightmares doubled the risk of these problems, including hallucinations, interrupted thoughts or delusions.

Hallucination involves seeing things that other people don’t – such as people’s faces, or other images or visions, like animals or religious figures. You may also see objects that appear distorted, or that move in ways they normally wouldn’t or experiencing tastes, smells and sensations that have no apparent cause – such as feeling insects crawling on your skin and hearing voices that other people don’t.

The children aged between 2 and 9 years old with persistent nightmares reported by parents had up to one and a half times increased risk of developing psychotic experiences.

A psychotic experience or episode is when you perceive or interpret events differently from people around you.

The researchers have said that: “These findings tentatively suggest that arousal and rapid eye movement forms of sleep disorder might be early indicators of susceptibility to psychotic experiences.”

Should parents be worried?

The researchers however say that parents need not be worried. This is because nightmares are very common among children and they tend to become less frequent as the child gets older.

“We certainly don’t want to worry parents with this news; three in every four children experience nightmares at this young age,” says study author Professor Dieter Wolke in a statement.

 

“However, nightmares over a prolonged period or bouts of night terrors that persist into adolescence can be an early indicator of something more significant in later life.”