Many years ago in the old Hall of Indians at the Carnegie Museum in Oakland, a little girl came upon a statue of a Lakota Sioux warrior. He was a fearsome sight, at least 8 feet tall, wearing only a loin cloth, his war-painted face frozen in a grimace, in one hand a scalp, in the other a bloody butcher knife.

Illustration by Stacy Innerst, Post-Gazette Today is the third installment of a five-part series on the mysteries and meanings of dreams. Today's stories explore nightmares, which are common among young children, who usually grow out of them. But that doesn't happen for everyone. Nearly 14 million American adults have recurring nightmares each evening. We explore how they can confront their fearsome dreams. Click illustration for larger image. In Your Dreams One solution to nightmares: imagine a better ending Night terrors are rare, but normal for children Helping children cope with nightmares Resources for chidren and adults Dream Journal: Jean-Jacques Sene Yesterday: Dream History After 50 years, the veil begins to lift on our dreams Dream Journal: Tara Deringor Dream society seeks middle ground behind hard science and symbolism Experts trying to awaken Pittsburgh interest in dream study Sunday: Dream Science The science of dreams Dreams: From falling to failing, it's the same old stories The 12 universal dreams Dreams and the arts: PG critics pick their dream theme team Insight from a decade-long journal of dreams A dream journal 'how-to'

The little girl had grown up hearing stories from her mother about the atrocities that Native Americans had suffered at the hands of white European settlers, and that night, she had a nightmare -- that all the Indians ever killed by the white man came back to life to seek revenge, led by the warrior from the Carnegie Museum.

"They were stampeding down Murray Avenue in Squirrel Hill, millions of them, and they were heading straight to my house," remembered the woman, now grown, who didn't want her name used.

She tried everything to get rid of the nightmare. Some nights, in desperation, she would pay her little sister a nickel to crawl into bed with her, or place her stuffed dog at the window to scare the warriors away. This went on for close to three years until the nightmare finally vanished, for a simple reason: the little girl grew up. Now she can laugh about it -- a little.

"For several years after that, though, I couldn't watch a cowboy movie without being scared to death," she said.

Nightmares are with us almost from birth, and last throughout our lives. Many very young children have them repeatedly, and then, as their brains learn to process the images that bombard them throughout the day, the nightmares fade in intensity and frequency.

"When children grow older, they develop the cognitive ability to separate dreams from reality," said noted California sleep disorder expert Alan Siegel, "and they have more of a chance of making that distinction upon waking up. They're better able to reassure themselves and be more amenable to accepting help from adults."

Very often, though, adults need help and reassurance too.

As much as half of the U.S. population continues to have nightmares at least once a year, either remembering them or not, and usually able to shrug them off. But not everyone is so lucky. A significant number of adults in America today find themselves frequently spending every night -- or many nights -- being pushed off buildings, getting caught in quicksand, fleeing down endless corridors, drowning, screaming at their loved ones or at the boss at work, escaping murderers, or committing murder themselves.

Sometimes, it's the same nightmare, over and over again, disturbing enough to wreck sleep and cause the sufferer to drag through the day and fear going to sleep again when bedtime comes. An estimated 5 to 8 percent of all adults experience this most extreme form of recurring nightmares, comparable to other major psychological disorders, such as depression, which affects about 9 percent of all adults in the U.S.

That's nearly 14 million adults suffering recurring nightmares each evening.

What are nightmares?

In ancient times, nightmares were thought to be caused by evil spirits. The word, in fact, derives from a Scandinavian legend in which a "nachtmara" -- the "mara" being a female demon -- came and sat on the sleeper's chest at night, leaving him with a heavy, suffocating sensation of being awake but paralyzed.

Nightmares have been known to inspire great artists: John Henry Fuseli's 1781 painting "The Nightmare," caused a sensation with its depiction of an incubus crouching on the body of a sleeping woman. (You may view the painting at artmagick.com/paintings/painting1103.aspx.)

John Newton, composer of the hymn "Amazing Grace," and a slave trader, became an abolitionist after a nightmare in which he saw "all of Europe consumed in a great raging fire" while he was the captain of a slave ship. Robert Louis Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" was inspired, in part, by a nightmare.

And Elias Howe, who invented the sewing machine, actually came up with the breakthrough concept of a needle with a hole at the pointed end after he had a nightmare in which jungle warriors brandished spears that had holes in their blades.

In the 19th century, some philosophers blamed nightmares on indigestion. Sigmund Freud actually had some difficulty explaining nightmares as part of his thesis that dreams are the expression of unfulfilled wishes, so he generally ignored them. Later, Carl Gustav Jung described them as part of humankind's "collective unconscious" and said the helplessness we feel in nightmares is a memory of the fears experienced by primitive peoples.

Today, in medical textbooks, nightmares are most commonly defined as a disturbing dream that results in at least a partial awakening. Otherwise, they're just bad dreams.

Sometimes, nightmares are caused or aggravated by drugs, medications or illness. Some foods will trigger more vivid dreams, although researchers haven't pinpointed which ones. Trauma, surgery, a death in the family, crime and accidents also can cause them to proliferate.

But regular, non-trauma-related nightmares, with no recurring theme, occur most frequently in childhood, beginning at around age 2, intensifying around age 5 and then winding down after age 8 or 9. Twenty to 39 percent of all children between 5 and 12 suffer from nightmares, according to one study, while night terrors -- a distinct phenomenon that occurs earlier in sleep -- affect between 1 and 4 percent of the same age group.

Personality traits are often linked to the frequency of nightmares -- or at least the ability to remember them. One study at the University of Toronto found that art majors were three times as likely to have nightmares as those majoring in physical education.

John Beale, Post-Gazette Anne Germain, an expert on nightmares at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Oakland, believes adults who suffer the frightening dreams don't necessarily have to understand their psychological meaning to figure out how to make them go away. Click photo for larger image.

While culture may play a role here -- a macho athlete might have more difficulty admitting he had a weird dream -- "the bottom line is that people who have a good component of openness to the external world, who are more in touch with their own sense of self and emotions, are perhaps more able to remember their dreams," said Anne Germain, a researcher at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Oakland who studies patients with recurring nightmares.

Some sleep researchers consider the occasional nightmare a natural response to stress, the body's way of practicing its "fight or flee" response, a way for us to work through aggressive feelings in a safe way, since the body's muscles are essentially paralyzed during rapid eye movement, REM, sleep.

"Nightmares are actually a moment when your brain rehearses motor patterns that have survival values," Germain said. "Kids will dream about monsters and animals a lot, as representing a primitive sense of danger. As their brains mature, all these connections of neurons in the brain practice the flight reactions in the face of danger."

But many psychologists -- some of them trained in the writings of Freud and Jung -- believe that nightmares, like all dreams, carry much more meaning within them, and that they are the psyche's way of alerting us that something is wrong.

"These stories that come to the surface, spontaneous, unbidden, are from the so-called part of the psyche beneath the surface, like the iceberg in the movie 'Titanic,'" said Thomas W. Sheridan, a clinical psychologist who serves on the medical staff at Allegheny General Hospital's Department of Psychiatry. "But medicine is not very good at attending to this."

"The trick about nightmares is to ask ourselves: Why is this happening now in my life?" said Charles McPhee, an author of two books on dreams who calls himself "The Dream Doctor" on a nationally syndicated radio program. "Dreams are mirrors of our waking life. Nightmares are a way of alerting us to what is unresolved in our lives."

Trauma and nightmares

Ernest Hartmann, a psychiatry professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine, identified two kinds of nightmares. The first, he said, were fairly common nightmares dating from childhood, with a frequently changing story line, one often affected by recent events.

The second type is a recurring nightmare, as described by trauma victims or those who experienced some kind of disaster. Concentration camp survivors, torture victims and rape victims all tend to relive the experience over and over again in their dreams.

Many nightmares after a specific trauma contain little about that event itself -- but rather contain references to past traumas, which resurface again after exposure to the new one, added Deirdre Barrett, a Harvard University researcher who authored an influential book, "Trauma and Dreams."

After Sept. 11, "you saw a lot more people starting to have bad nightmares who had some other history of trauma in their lives. More typically people would report dreaming of a bombing plot, and the terrorist had the face of the person who had raped them when they were a child. Those issues were still there after all those years."

In his own studies of nightmares among trauma survivors, Siegel has found some surprising variations.

After the 1991 wildfires that destroyed neighborhoods in Oakland, Calif., Siegel had three groups of people keep dream journals -- those who lost their homes, those living outside the fire zone altogether, and those whose homes were saved while the others around them burned.

That last group experienced the worst nightmares of all, he found, "because the people who lost their homes were able to get reassurance from the community. They sort of took on a 'noble victim' status, whereas those whose homes didn't burn never got the emotional validation of those who lost everything, but they saw the horrors first hand. And they suffered tremendous guilt."

Victims of those fires also reported dreams about tidal waves or being menaced by gangs of criminals, rather than fire-related nightmares, which, Siegel said, indicated that nightmares can be influenced by underlying fears or childhood issues.

Nightmares generally have been considered the orphan stepchild in sleep research, but that's changing, Germain said. She is studying how daily events and daytime functioning affect nightmares -- a subject that has not undergone serious scientific scrutiny.

		INTRIGUED? We'd like to hear about your dreams. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette welcomes interested dreamers to e-mail samples that will be published in the newspaper or on the PG Web site. If you haven't been keeping track of your dreams, get started now. Send any dreams you feel comfortable in sharing by Dec. 19 to dreams@post-gazette.com. Type in "dreams" in the subject line. Please include your name, age and home town or neighborhood. Obviously, we can't publish them all, but we'll do our best to pull together as wide a selection as possible.

"Does the way you feel during one particular day -- stressed out because of a traffic jam or disappointed because your child came home with bad grades -- affect your nightmares that night? Or do those setbacks surface in your dreams weeks later?"

She said it's been difficult to recruit people for her research.

"Most people won't talk about nightmares. There still is this general idea that if you have them, you have to be crazy at some level," a theory dating back to the 1960s and 1970s, when nightmares were associated with schizophrenia.

Many chronic nightmare sufferers are ashamed to discuss them.

"People will feel I'm a weirdo," said one woman who sought psychological help for a recurring dream that deeply disturbed her, as she explained why she didn't want to be named for this story.

"I'm an attorney, and I'm not sure how my clients would react to reading about my dreams in the newspaper."

Nonetheless, researchers are pushing ahead. In April, Germain's colleague, Dr. Mark Blagrove, an internationally known sleep expert, recruited hundreds of students at the University of Wales to find out why some people are terrified by their bad dreams, while others are not.

"Within the past 10 years so much new evidence has surfaced to help us treat and understand nightmares. We still don't know the whys and the hows, but we're starting to have some ideas," Germain said.

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Tomorrow: Walking, fighting and eating while dreaming