Crying While Dreaming: Why Does This Happen?
Rebecca’s eyes snap open in the middle of the night again. It’s difficult to see; they are filled with tears. She has been crying again. She wipes her eyes and rolls over to check her alarm. It’s 4 am; she’s woken up again two hours before her alarm goes off. This was the 3rd or 4th incident of her crying while sleeping since her father passed away months ago. She is uncertain about what it means; she wonders if the meaning of her crying while sleeping is that she is going crazy.
While it is true that crying while sleeping can be indicative of a psychological disorder, this is not always the case. It can be a healthy sign that the subconscious mind and the nervous system are discharging suppressed or repressed emotions. We’ll explore why that is and what it means in today’s post.
Crying While Sleeping: Meaning From Neuroscience and Hypnotherapy
To understand the meaning of crying while sleeping, the first thing to notice is what time of the night it is occurring. If it’s in the early morning before you wake up like Rebecca, this is a good sign it’s a healthy discharge of trapped emotion. Early morning sleep is when the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep cycles are the longest and what my hypnotherapy teacher, Dr. Kappas, referred to as the third stage of sleep.
The significance of REM sleep is neuroscience has shown the brain is performing memory consolidation. This is significant because one of Dr. Kappas’s theories was venting dreams occurred in the third stage of sleep. These were dreams that were symbolic of the mind venting out some unresolved emotional conflict. When you combine this observation with what neuroscience knows of REM sleep, you get a strong case for the mind processing past events and resolving emotional conflicts during this time of the night.
What makes the case even stronger is how we, as hypnotherapists, have been able to analyze these dreams and tie them into real, unresolved emotional conflicts going on in the lives of our clients.
Crying While Sleeping: Different Causes and Their Meaning
As you read this, you are probably thinking “Okay, great, my mind is processing an unresolved emotional conflict. Isn’t that kind of broad though? What kind of conflict specifically?”. That’s a great question and why there is much more variation, there are some big, common themes behind the meaning of crying while sleeping.
1. Grieving
The loss of a loved one is such a powerful emotional event that the subconscious mind often needs weeks or months to work through the emotional conflict created by their passing. As a result, the unresolved conflict often carries over into our dreams. Thus, crying while sleeping’s meaning is just a healthy discharge of the natural, organic emotions experienced during loss.
2. Stress
Have you ever been put under heavy demands and pressure to the point where you had no time to decompress? The mind can compensate with the equivalent of a good stress cry while sleeping. Crying while sleeping in this case is a healthy discharge of stress to bring the nervous system into balance.
3. Repressed Events
Are you crying while sleeping, but can’t pinpoint it to an event in your present life or the past few months? It could be the mind beginning to resolve a traumatic event from childhood. A theory behind this is sometimes events we experience as children are too intense for their minds to handle, so the mind represses them. Then, when the child grows into an adult and their mind is capable of processing the event, the mind begins to present it for resolution.
4. Suppressed Emotions
All of those emotions you’ve been avoiding confronting and not allowing yourself to feel? They have to go somewhere; it’s implied in the name. Motion is in the word ’emotion’ and emotions are meant to move. If you are resisting your own emotional experience, the subconscious mind will take things into its own hands with intense, venting dreams.
Hypnotherapy Can Help You Overcome Crying While Sleeping
Would you like to get to the real core issue behind the meaning of crying while sleeping? Would you like to expedite the resolution of the conflict so you can go back to sleeping soundly? Hypnotherapists can use dream analysis to break down your venting dreams to discover the heart of the problem. We have powerful tools for resolving emotional conflicts in a short period, creating powerful change in clients’ lives in a short period.
Did you find this post on crying while sleeping’s meaning helpful? Then, you may find these posts on being too tired to sleep, waking up anxious, and sleep maintenance insomnia to be useful.
