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Nightmares Speak Truth

Your Dreams Hold The Future

Emilly Rose Jones
6 min readDec 31, 2024
Photo by Freepik

I never thought my nightmares would save my life. Yet here I am, staring at my reflection in the dim light of my bathroom mirror at 3 AM, grateful for another terrifying dream that jolted me awake. You might think I’ve lost my mind, finding gratitude in these nocturnal terrors, but science has revealed a truth that’s both fascinating and frightening: our nightmares might be our brain’s desperate attempts to warn us about our cognitive future.

Let that sink in for a moment. Those heart-pounding, sweat-inducing dreams that leave you gasping in the dark? They’re not just random neural fireworks. They’re messages from your future self, encoded in the language of fear and uncertainty. And I’ve learned to listen to them, just as I wished my mother had listened to hers.

Six years. That’s how long we spend dreaming during our lifetime. Six full years of our consciousness swimming in a sea of symbols, emotions, and warnings. It’s an astonishing figure that made me pause when I first encountered it. We spend more time dreaming than we do eating, exercising, or even scrolling through social media. Yet, we dismiss these nocturnal experiences as mere inconveniences, digital trash to be deleted from our mental hard drives come morning.

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Emilly Rose Jones
Emilly Rose Jones

Written by Emilly Rose Jones

I am passionate about writing and I love sharing reflections on health (sexual, mental and physical), without being afraid to express myself.

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