Ok, picture yourself doing a search on your computer, what you will end up with are lots of different things to click on about whatever you are searching for. That is how your brain also works. While we sleep our brains are doing their own searches in an effort to find some way of resolving the events that challenge us the most.

When someone experiences a trauma the stress of the trauma creates an imprint in the brain because we are designed to remember things that are life threatening so we do avoid them, but also make it a point to learn about them so we can think about better ways of self protecting. All the things you feel, guilt, anger, desire to sound an alarm, desire to avoid desire to vent and articulate the trauma are all part of how we are designed to ensure our survival and also seek out a "safer" environment.

So, your brain is doing a search at night while you sleep, not to keep traumatizing you, but instead to find some way of experiencing an event where you find a way of better self protecting. We have recently discovered that our brain actually "learns" at night while we sleep.

Our brains are designed to learn a pattern where we can follow a structured way of living our lives. So, in that we tend to live our lives on auto pilot more than we realize. The frontal executive part of our brain is designed to keep track of our daily challenges and only briefly check into our automatic structured way of living our lives. When a major trauma takes place, it changes our sense of automatic structure to the point where one doesn't feel safe to continue on with that automatic structured way of living their lives. You know the saying "ignorance is bliss"? Well, that saying is actually true in that we all live our lives in a automatic structure and there can be things or people around us that are unhealthy in some way, but, if we don't experience a major disruption to a structure we get used to living, we can continue to function on an auto pilot in whatever way we developed that auto pilot.

Trauma disrupts our structure, and can set a person back where they begin to examine their auto pilot, and that can be exhausting because our excutive functioning part of our brain gets overworked. It's much like if you were working a job that you developed a rythm of doing and then suddenly experience an extra work load dump that overwhelms you. Well, that is what is taking place with the frontal lobe executive functioning part of our brain. What can happen is that the frontal executive part of the brain gets distracted by doing a file search, and so much so that a person begins to lose track of time. When that happens it can be scarey, well ofcourse it can because the average person isn't used to doing these deep searches and it does change our sense of time and it's also tiring.

So, while you are concerned about these dreams, it's important to think about "why" you are experiencing them and it's because your brain is trying to find ways to "learn" what to do about whatever the situation is so you can put it to rest and move forward and hopefully regain your sense of structure again.