Sleep is meant to rest and recuperate. Unfortunately, this is not always the case: a person may wake up "broken" and completely exhausted. This happens after nightmares, and one of the most unpleasant "plots" is the persecution.
Anyone can haunt in a dream - a person or an animal, a fantastic character or a real one, but the result is always the same: excruciating fear in a dream and feeling unwell in the morning.
Currently, there is no shortage of dream books that offer all kinds of interpretations of such dreams. Even the details are being clarified, why are the pursuing law enforcement officers dreaming, and why - "the enraged donkey". Scientific psychology does not take such "logical constructions" seriously, but it has a lot to say about the real reasons for such nightmares.
From the point of view of psychology, stalking in a dream is a manifestation of anxiety, a feeling of insecurity that a person experiences in real life. Perhaps a person guesses that he is in some kind of danger, but these guesses, like all unpleasant thoughts, are pushed into the sphere of the unconscious, in order to then appear in a dream.
The psycho-traumatic situation does not always relate to the present time - in a dream, fear experienced in the past and also displaced into the sphere of the unconscious can return. For example, one woman's dreams in which she ran away from a man pursuing her were associated with memories of her former roommate, who was a real “domestic tyrant”.
From the standpoint of gestalt therapy, a direction in psychotherapy based on expanding awareness of oneself, it is not an external threat that can act as a persecutor in a dream, but something that a person fears in himself: aggression, hatred towards someone, thirst for revenge, and others. motives that a person considers unacceptable and suppresses.
Dreams, in which the pursuer catches up with the sleeping person and hurts him, require special attention. In a dream, the images and sensations saved by the memory are actualized, and the memory never retains painful sensations. Therefore, the pain felt in a dream is always real. The reason for it may be accidental - an uncomfortable bed, a foreign object in the bed - but sometimes we are talking about a latent stage of some kind of disease. From medical practice, there is a case when a person was chased by a dog in a dream and eventually bit his leg, and after a while an ulcer appeared on the leg. As it turned out, the dream took place against the background of the latent stage of anthrax in the cutaneous form.
If the pursuer is strangling, it means that the sleeping person has difficulty breathing. The reason may be situational - the sleeper buried his nose in the pillow, the room was not aired, but if such dreams recur regularly, this indicates a respiratory disease - bronchitis, pleurisy, pulmonary tuberculosis.
Dreams with elements of persecution also occur in people suffering from heart disease. True, these people cannot run away from the pursuer in a dream and do not even see him, usually describing him as “someone dark” who comes down from above or stands nearby, not allowing him to turn. Such dreams in heart patients are always accompanied by the fear of death.
