A student taking a class in lucid dreaming struggled with the emotional aftermath of her nightmares. “After waking up from the nightmare in a fit of sobs,” she reported, “the terror from the dream followed me everywhere that day.”
This is the emotion of malneirophrenia, the lingering sense of oppressive unease that follows after waking from a nightmare. Malneirophrenia is a useful reminder of the irrationality of emotions. Too often, we seek to establish a simple cause and effect narrative to explain our feelings, and to justify them in a world that demands that we make sense.
We usually realize that our nightmares are not objectively real within a minute of gaining consciousness. Nonetheless, the feeling of wrongness provoked by our bad dreams stays with us. We have the feeling that the frightening experiences of the dreams speak to some kind of real problems in our waking lives, even though, given the rapidly fading clarity of dreams, we typically can’t put our finger on the issue that’s bothering us.
The emotion of malneirophrenia stays with us, regardless of our inability to make sense of it, suggesting that the dread we feel in nightmares may be less about tangible threats than it is about the terror of our own minds.
