THE HUMAN CONDITION / WHY WE HAVE NIGHTMARES : The Dark Dreams

In the dead of night, Danielle Foster finds herself bound with rope, squirming in the crawl space under a house while a “slithering beast” gnaws on her flesh. The 37-year-old Temeculawoman wakes up screaming.

Lloyd Noonan, 35, of Culver City closes his eyes and ends up in a college science class he never attended but can’t graduate without. The professor hands him the final exam.

In Santa Ana, 30-year-old Pam Worrell repeatedly dreams that her shoes are filled with lead and she’s running from a clown.

Every night, millions of sleepers drift into the unsettling, often terrifying realm of the nightmare. Some bad dreams carry hidden messages, experts say. Others appear more related to such factors as cold weather and lousy Dracula movies.

Now research suggests an added twist--the nightmare hangover: Bad dreams don’t just reflect daytime problems, they might actually cause them. But a simple cure seems to clear up the haunting dreams and aftereffects.

The usual source of nightmares is a traumatic event from the past or a troubling issue in the present, says Marc Schoen, a psychologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. A 12-year-old girl, for example, kept dreaming of a man dressed in black coming down from the ceiling to take her away. Schoen traced the nightmare to the death of the girl’s brother in the same room: “It represented her fear that death would come take her, too.”

During nightmares, the mind wrestles with unresolved feelings or problems, Schoen says. An elderly widow who couldn’t let go of memories of her late husband had a recurring dream in which she chased him through fields, buildings and cities, never able to catch him, he says.

Fleeting stresses and worries also can unleash unpleasant dreams. A Los Angeles woman who had sneaked long naps while working a graveyard shift says she often dreamed of being discovered slumbering--in the nude--by her supervisors.

Even seemingly innocuous events can seep into nightmares. Carol Losi, 32, of Cambridge, Mass., recalls laughing through a campy Dracula flick only to spend the next week dreaming that all her friends were vampires.

“I can’t watch horror films,” she says now. “My mind clings to things.”

Indeed, certain people seem more sensitive to things they see, read or hear, according to sleep researchers. But that doesn’t mean the images lack symbolism. How a TV show or book is incorporated into a dream says something about what’s going on in a person’s mind, experts say.

“People can get important information about themselves and their relationship to the world (from nightmares) . . . because the issues being brought up are more threatening,” says Joseph Neidhardt, a psychiatrist in Fairbanks, Alaska, who co-wrote “Conquering Bad Dreams and Nightmares,” due out in October.

Deciphering those dream symbols, however, is an inexact art.

Some are fairly transparent: Foster’s nightmare with the slithering beast chomping at her flesh came at a time when various pressures seemed to be tearing her apart, she says.

But other dreams are tougher to crack. “People have their own personal symbols,” Neidhardt says.

Even seemingly universal images can trip up experts: A rose signifies love to most people, Neidhardt says, but it might mean something altogether different to a gardener.

Likewise, a biting dog in a nightmare can represent another person or anything but another person--depending on which psychiatrist is interpreting the dream.

Then again, it might just mean the covers fell off. Ann Harrison, 33, of Orange, awoke from a nightmare about a turtle snapping at her toe and found her foot sticking out from under the blanket, freezing.

A Leucadia man also reports that his nightmares usually occur when temperatures plunge and the covers slip off.

Dreams sometimes become negative when the sleeper is cold, says Milton Erman, director of the Sleep Disorders Center at the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla.

Other bodily sensations also influence dreams. In one study, researchers sprayed water on sleeping subjects, causing dreams about rainstorms and drowning.

A full bladder can spur panicky dreams about searching for a toilet, says a San Diego man who has awakened from several such episodes.

Nightmares in which a person tries to run from something but can’t move seem linked to the physical paralysis that people experience during certain stages of sleep, Erman says.

And some drugs--including medications for blood pressure and Parkinson’s disease--can cause nightmares. Experts disagree, however, whether certain foods or illnesses disturb dreams. Krakow doesn’t even buy the argument that feeling cold leads to nightmares. He labels such theories “old wives’ tales.”

Another myth: If you dream that you die, you will. Krakow says plenty of studies prove otherwise.

Age, however, does seem to play a role.

Children usually have more nightmares than teens and adults, some involving space aliens, monsters and other outlandish creatures. The presence of monsters “probably reflects (children’s) perception of the world, their place in it (and) the amount of power and control they have over their environment,” Erman says.

The intensity and frequency of nightmares generally fades with age. And the monsters and Martians turn into muggers, bosses and other forces of darkness.

Toward middle age and beyond, death and failing bodies sometimes figure into nightmares, Erman says: A dream about losing an object might actually represent fear of losing a physical skill.

Surprise exams can appear at any age, even among people who finished school years earlier.

“In a way, the exam is a metaphor (for the) various things in life we are not prepared for,” Erman says. “Those dreams probably relate to some level of performance anxiety during the daytime.”

Scott Worrell’s anxiety dream transports him back to a high school drama production of “Our Town.” Suddenly someone whispers, “You’re on” and pushes him onstage. In the spotlight, with everyone staring, the 26-year-old Santa Ana man realizes he’s forgotten his lines.

Les Douglas, a 33-year-old instructor at Fullerton and Orange Coast community colleges, has an exam nightmare in reverse: The semester has started and he’s completely forgotten to show up and start teaching.

Few nightmares are cause for worry, Schoen says, unless they are recurring or chronic. In such instances, people might want professional help to explore their dreams’ origins--unless they read a report in the May issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

It describes a University of New Mexico study of chronic nightmare sufferers that challenges the conventional wisdom that bad dreams reflect daytime anxiety or depression.

It’s the other way around, says Dr. Barry Krakow, who helped write the report and worked with Neidhardt on his book.

When test subjects learned an exercise to eliminate nightmares, Krakow says, daytime anxiety, depression and hostility also cleared up. Some subjects said they’d never felt better.

The results mystified researchers. “Maybe it’s because they sleep better. . . . You have to wonder whether it’s that simple,” Krakow says. Or maybe overcoming nightmares gives people confidence to conquer other problems.

Still another theory involves a phenomenon called the nightmare hangover: People waking up from bad dreams sometimes feel lousy and upset the rest of the day, especially if nightmarish images keep returning, Krakow says.

The conclusion is obvious.

“If you dream every night that you’re killing someone or someone is killing you, how can you not feel better when that dream goes away?” Krakow asks.

Schoen remains skeptical: If the nightmare represents a serious emotional wound, “you can’t just change the dream only. . . . It’ll come up again.”

Krakow concedes that Schoen might be right--additional studies are under way--but after two years of tracking the original subjects, no problems have arisen: “People ask, ‘If I do get rid of these dreams and nightmares, will I become a homicidal maniac because the emotions have to come out some other way?’ We haven’t found that.”

The nightmare remedy used in the New Mexico study is called imagery rehearsal: Patients are told to describe and write down their nightmares, think up new endings, write them down and then go over the new scenarios in their minds for a few minutes once or twice a day until the dreams disappear.

A Los Angeles woman who took part in the study says she went from two or three bad dreams a night to two or three a week. Before contacting Krakow, she’d tried therapy, psychics and countless books, to no avail.

“I can’t say that it’s changed my life . . . but I have noticed a more peaceful night’s sleep, which is a real gift,” she says.

Krakow cautions that the method doesn’t work for everybody--a few people actually suffered worse nightmares--but says it’s far more successful than traditional therapy.

Schoen argues for another approach: hypnosis. He puts patients in a trance, then asks their unconscious minds for the cause and interpretation of the nightmares. From there, he reshapes the dream.

A man with cancer, for instance, dreamed he was in a house that suddenly went dark and began collapsing on him as he tried to flee. The nightmare symbolized the man’s fears of mortality, Schoen says.

Through hypnosis, the psychologist induced dreams in which the man stayed in the house for longer and longer periods of time until he overcame the fear.

“We not only have to change the nightmare (but also) the mental scar that created the nightmare,” he says.

Sometimes, bad dreams just go away.

For months after an Orange County woman’s husband died of a heart attack, she kept dreaming that he had disappeared and she couldn’t find him. “I’d hear his car in the garage and I’d go outside and the car would be there but he was gone,” she says. Or she’d find herself searching for him in places they visited when he was alive.

Finally, one night she caught him on a hill and demanded to know why he left her, why he couldn’t have waited. He looked her in the eyes and calmly replied: “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

Her nightmares haven’t returned.