Narcissist Stalks Your Dreams, Nightmares

a lucid dream a lucid dream is a dream in which the sleeper is aware that they're dreaming the sleeper influences the progress of the dream and chooses its trajectory and its ending you know these books where you can choose the ending or films in the '90s and and a bit later there were kind of specialized div is where you could choose the ending of the movie that's a lucid dream when you're asleep and you control the dream its content the plot its direction its symbols perfectly The Narcissist shared fantasy is a form of lucid dreaming it is his lucid dream and you are just a character in the dream manipulated according to a pre-order ordained script The Narcissist incorporates you into the shared Fantasy by entraining you and this process triggers injects and repressed memories you can watch my videos about and training in a nutshell it's a process where the narcissist uses verbal uh mantras verbal cues mostly verbal abuse in order to induce in your brain brain a state that is a clone or a replica of his own state of brain narcissist synchronizes his brain with your brain literally the same waves using this verbal form of verbal manipulation known as ENT trining but in trining triggers other voices in your mind they're known as injects and in meing raises to the surface resurfaces repressed memories in other words it counters dissociation now these are very traumatic processes even when they are unconscious and they generate something called abreaction when you bring forgotten inhibited rejected and forbidden material experiences memories voices from the unconscious into the into Consciousness where this generates concurrent emotional release there a discharge of very powerful emotions tensions stresses and anxiety in your mind this is colloquially but wrongly erroneously called emotional flashback it is not a flashback but the emotions are strong and overpowering now because the narcissist uses and training most of these most of these processes that I've just described occur they happen in the unconscious so you're not aware of anything um that is intrusive or problematic or discombobulating or discomforting you're not aware of any of this it just as a generally growing malaise you feel more and more at ease and uncomfortable even by the way on a first meeting with an narcissist this is known as The Uncanny Valley reaction okay so the shared fantasy is a form of lucid dream the narcissis introduces you into this dream and then uses you manipulates you as a character in the dream in order to realize the plot of the dream and to bring it to its inevitable result resolution separation individuation via devaluation and discard watch the videos in the shared fantasy playlist now dreams are intimately connected to the processing of traumas and this is the topic of today's video my name is s vaknin i the author of malignant self- Lov narcissism Revisited I'm a former visiting professor of psychology and currently a professor of psychology and business studies in cups um Commonwealth of Commonwealth of international Advanced Studies professional studies in Cambridge United Kingdom Ontario Canada and other locations throughout the Universe okay let's start with a nightmare disorder nightmare disorder is a sleep disorder characterized by repeated occurrences of extended well remembered dysphoric dreams of of involving themes of threat that result in Awakening from the sleep and significant distress and impairment it used to be known as dream anxiety disorder and it is one of the parasomnias for those of you who want to delve deeper but your experience within the narcissist shared fantasy is actually a nightmare disorder there is there is a emotional as if the feeling that you are somehow trapped in a narrative a piece of fiction a theater play a movie not of your own making and that you're going through the motions inexorably as if you were programmed as if you had become a robot or a zombie and this is a very bad feeling it's very dysphoric in other words not pleasant and there's a kind of diffuse ambient sense of minacious of threat it's minatory it's it's uh it's it's uh it's false and threatening at the same time it's like um finding yourself inside a horror movie rather than merely watching it and so this is the general feeling within the dream Yung proposed that we have something called The Dream ego in analytic in analytic psychology this is the fragment of the conscious ego that is acting active during the dream state so when you're trapped in the nightmare disorder that is the narcissist shared fantasy you do perceive yourself as separate you do perceive yourself as existing apart from the narcissist and apart from the sh fantasy this is your dream ego but you're still embedded in something in as I said in a narrative in a plot in a movie that is far removed from reality I would even say divorce from reality and this gradually impairs your reality testing your ability to perceive reality to judge it appropriately to evaluate it to gauge it is severely damaged the longer you're exposed to the narcissist and to his shared fantasy now it doesn't mean necessarily that you begin to hallucinate that is rare or that you become delusional or that is much more common it simply means that the narcissist becomes your conduit your channel to reality you judge reality you evaluate it engage it through the narcissist you externalize the ego function of reality testing you make the narcissis your litmos test when it comes to reality and you therefore abrogate and surrender your personal autonomy your agency your self-efficacy because in the absence of reality testing we are unable to operate in any meaningful way we become dysfunctional the narcissist is there to pick up the slack and become your external regulator and so while you do perceive yourself as as separate from the narciss external to the narcissist that is largely self-deception because having been embedded in the lucid dream that is a Shar fantasy you are being constantly gustl you self Gaslight actually narcissists don't Gaslight they don't have a premeditated plan to make you doubt your sanity to make you um to undermine Your Capacity to judge reality that is what Psychopaths do but the impact the effect of the Shir fantasy because it's a dreamlike a dreamlike state um the effect or the impact are T amount they're the same as gaslighting in a permanent State you're in a permanent state of gaslighting and then you begin to gas light yourself because this create a lot of what is known as ego disty you feel uncomfortable with this situation so you would rather lie to yourself than conf front reality and lose the narcissist in the process now more generally pieces of daily experiences show up in dreams um this this is known as dream incorporation memories from from throughout the day reappear in the dream although usually um these memories from daily life um show up immediately the same night and then disguised usually as in symbolic in symbolic ways there's a lot of work done starting with Freud about dream censorship dream symbolism and so on so forth is magnanimous magnificent Masterpiece about dreams I think it was published in 1900 1901 okay day residue is the transfer of daily memories into dreams and memories from waking experience are subjected to what is known as dream lag a dream lag is a delay typically about 5 to seven days the memory is being created in the waking day and then it shows up in a dream so our Dream our dreams are comprised of immediate memories that are created in the day preceding the sleep and day um dream lag memories memories that were created 5 to seven day prior to the dream and there is no great consensus no big no meaningful broad consensus as to how trauma is processed through dreams although we know for sure that traumas affect our dreams still this is an emerging field of study sigon Freud the founder and father of psychoanalysis offered an early perspective he suggested the dreams allow us allow us access to the unconscious he said that the unconscious manifests in dreams talks to us in dreams although um the the Sleep our sleep state is protected by containing the anxiety associated with repressed memories experiences desires and drives so our sleep is protected um because the content from the unconscious makes it into our dreams disguised disguised in a variety of ways disguised as narratives as fables as Legends as symbols and and so on so forth this was Freud and Freud lived um and worked more than a century ago in the meantime we have learned a thing or two about dreams although we are still very far from understanding the utility of dreams we do know already that animals dream and even very lowlevel animals like spiders so dreams dreams seemed to be something of a biological function researchers thought the dreams allowed people to revisit and work through old trauma nightmares were seen as a failure to work through or to Buster traumatic experiences other Scholars believed that nightmares were a way in which the Mind transforms shame and other negative effects associated with the traumatic event and then the convert all these negative effects into fear and a sense of do doom and looming threat and again we are not quite sure of the answer we are not quite sure of the answer except that we know that content related to traumatic experiences and events does make it its way into dreams dreams help us to integrate our experiences into long-term memory the hippocampus is involved in this a process called called memory consolidation when we are exposed to a traumatic experience especially a prolonged traumatic experience such as the narcissist shared fantasy um we develop complex trauma the complex trauma is clinically significantly distinguished from acute trauma like PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder so dreams in this case would be recurrent there would be an attempt to process the complex long-term repeated trauma via dreams and this way to somehow enhance our ability to cope and to learn from traumatic situations this is intimately connected of course with bodily functions dreams can simulate threatening events and allow us to experience and to try out different responses you could therefore regard dreams as threat simulations being exposed to threats while you're safely asleep in your bed naturally reduces fears anxieties and allows you to uh securely access other areas of the brain which are very important for example create the creative Parts the decisionmaking parts the executive parts and so there's a lot of research demonstrates that um we are far more likely to approach threatening situations in dreams than to avoid them while in real life we try to avoid threats and risks and dangers and we try to not act recklessly in dreams we allow ourselves to do so and so in a dream state we actually become borderlines and Psychopaths for a few hours or a few minutes we've all heard of of of sleep that is restful you wake up you're animated you're vigorous or reinvigorated and so on and so forth but it seems that a lot of healing takes place while you sleep there's a reduction in the pain of traumatic memories there's a reframing of trauma recasting it in ways which are more acceptable to the psyche there's a processing of content in the unconscious so that it can become conscious without adverse consequences researchers in University of California Berkeley found that dreams occur during rapid eye movements R stage of sleep and at the same time our stress responses shut down they're neurochemicals that are responsible for anxiety for tension for stress and they are no longer released during the remm Sleep which is the dream state so when we dream the brain shuts off all stress anxiety and tension related mechanisms neurochemicals Pathways and so on so forth RM helps reduce the negative effects of difficult memories um there's an uh there's a study published authored by Paul Walker and others it was published in current biology and Walker says the dream stage of sleep based on its unique neurochemical composition provides us with a form of overnight therapy a soothing Bal that removes the sharp edges from the prior days emotional experiences now in PTSD and let it be clear when you're exposed to the narcissis you do not experience PTSD you experience cptsd complex trauma people with PTSD which is usually exposure to a single heavily severely traumatizing event like an accident natural disaster and so on rape so people with PTSD they they distress during the night so there's a distress function but it's not working well so PTSD while it is processed through dreams is not processed effectively emotional experience um to the trauma is never successfully separated from memory during the sleep of people with PTSD and so these people have very strong visceral reactions to flashbacks dreams normally provide perspective understanding of daily experiences a reprocessing of what has happened while in a low stress State stress anxiety tension they Cloud our thinking they create what is known as cognitive distortions grandiosity actually is a stress reaction the narcissist is very stressed about many many elements of his personality and so on so forth so he elicits narcissistic Supply in order to butress a misperception of reality cognitive distortion grandiosity and this this is this happens a lot in in dreams dreams uh undo they confront cognitive distortions and they undo them by reducing the stress reaction when you're not anxious when you're not stressed your perception of reality is much better it's much less distorted the dream gives you this opportunity now norrine a kind of adrenaline is sign significantly decreased in the brain during R sleep so this is very crucial there's no epinine adrenaline to others is is heavily uh implicated in cognitive distortions inability to perceive reality appropriately misjudging what's happening including environmental cues and social cues sexual cues and so on so forth when adrenaline is reduced it gives dreams a low stress atmosphere it imbus the dream with a low stress atmosphere which allows the dreamer to process emotional experiences the aforementioned Dr Walker made the connection between RM sleep and PTSD when he found that generic blood pressure medication was helping people with PTSD get better sleep with less reoccurring nightmares one side effect of the drug um the hypertension drug was a decrease in nor epinephrine so when Dr Walker put this together he realized the potential for R sleep RM sleep is a kind of anxiolytic anti-anxiety medication so what do dreams do remember that the narcissist shared fantasy is his dream his lucid dream and within the Shar fantasy The Narcissist feels safe it's a secure base it's divorced from reality it's a bubble that allows the narcissist to engage in cognitive distortions that reduce ego syntony and dissonance but at the same time as the narcissist creates a dream that is helpful to the narcissist that reduces The Narcissist anxiety dysphoria depression negative effects and so on he kind of creates the exact opposite in you he creates nightmare for you it's as if he were the narcissist were exporting all his negative emotions Envy anger hatred fear as if he were exporting all this to you as he is if he used you as a container for all these negative emotions but putting both of you himself and you in a dreamlike state only his dream is wonderful anxiety reducing U grandio fantasy your dream is his nightmare narcissist outsources his nightmares to you in your role is to serve as a receptacle of these nightmares in order to allow the narcissist to process his traumas and his anxieties and so on so forth and you see that this fit perfectly into the reenactment The Narcissist need to reenact and replay early childhood conflicts The Narcissist replace these conflicts in a relative in the relatively safe and secure environment of the shared fantasy but he needs to get rid of negative emotions negative effects negative memories negative experiences the trauma itself and so he hands them over to you and you are supposed to hold them hold these things for him and and this is very toxic this is very poisonous you're being slowly poisoned one of the most well studied commonly held theories about dreaming is that our brains employ dreams to work through emotionally difficult and stressful experiences U there's a kind of reduction in psychological load and so this reduces uh disruption to daily functioning you dream when you sleep you don't need to function so we cope with unusual levels of anxiety of stress of of tension uh partly through dreams we process them partly through dreams because dreams occur in a time of day or a time of night when we don't need to do other things so it's not a disruptive uh process nightmares and disturbing dreams they signs of the brain doing some essential house chores maintenance an important work um an attempt to ease the intensity and emotional charge of the heavy daily load of stresses anxieties worries and negative emotions nightmares also serve the purpose of alerting us alerting us to dangers to risks to anxieties and kind of bring them resurface them bring them to to the to Consciousness so nightmares are very useful and when you start to have nightmares within the shared fantasy and in the wake of the shed fantasy these are messages you'd better listen to them trying to tell you something Research into trauma and relationship to dreaming and sleep has shown that the more closely and directly people are affected by traumatic events the more it is likely that their sleep will be disrupted and their nightmares will be intense so nightmares uh are associated with both PTSD and cptsd both the acute version post-traumatic stress disorder and the complex trauma which is a less acute version and the the nightmares usually directly replay the triggering event or the actual trauma there was a study in 2009 n um a group of researchers looked into the impact of an earthquake in Italy and they found amazingly that the most disturbing dreams and most disrupted sleep occurred in people who were nearest to the epicenter of the Quake the further away from the Quake the people were the fewer the nightmares and the less disruption in sleep narcissist sh fantasy is the mother of all earthquakes and and you are likely to respond with extreme nightmares and dream processing we don't know exactly how the brain processes emotions uh during sleep and during dreams not exactly Neuroscience is a very young nent and budding s science uh contrary to what neuroscientists would tell you of course um during the stages of sleep we know that areas of the brain enter a state of what's known as emotional disinhibition and this particularly occurs during rapid eye movement RM sleep um at that time this is when we have the most Vivid complex emotionally Laden Dreaming by the way if we disrupt dreaming repeatedly we don't allow the person to dream they're driven to psychosis psychosis can be perceived as a kind of um wakefulness dreaming dreaming while you're awake when you cannot dream during sleep time you compensate by dreaming while you're awake and this is a good description um of psychosis so to achieve emotional disinhibition a region within the brain known as the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex shuts down this is a part of the brain that performs many complex executive functions including memory self-awareness attention and inhibition and control of emotional responses and yet it is shut down when we start to dream when we when this part shuts down this creates an unselfconscious free flow of emotion within dream there's no executive control the gates are open basically it's party time for the brain brain can go um outside the realm of reality brain can fantasize brain can use symbols symbols B brain the brain can reenact events counterfactually the brain can divorce reality the laws of physics don't imply any I mean all any laws don't there is an internal logic to the narrative but it doesn't obey any external laws and so the processing is far more efficacious and there's a sense of absolute safety in typical dreaming in nightmares the whole situation is reversed the flow of emotions uh disjointed memories symbology used and so on actually aggravate aggravate anxiety and worry and fear and a sense of of uh Menace and so on so forth this is the narcissist endowment this is his legacy this is his gift to you he gets rid of his own toxins of his own Poison by essentially transferring it to you via entraining dreams are where your brain processes information and as I said the major exception is lucid dreams where in lucid dreams the there's a part of the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex that actually becomes more active not less and this contributes to self-awareness and the ability to control and direct activity within lucid dreams in other words The Narcissist dreams while he is awake and the activity of the narcissist dreams is very different to the activity the activity of the brain of the narcissist brain during dreams it's very different to the activity of your brain during dreams The Narcissist uh entire existence is dreamlike the Shar fantasy is a dream WR large an expanded dream and the narcissist incorporates himself and you embeds both of you in the dream in this shared fantasy in this dream state and but his brain operates differently to yours and when you're having nightmares and the narcissist is having the Shar fantasy your your brains are out of sync the rest of the time your brains are totally synchronized via ENT trining so there is this hypothesis known as threat simulation dream theory according to this Theory there's some scientific evidence to support it dreams are a rehearsal space for the mind to kind of play out or game out it's a gamification thing threats and obstacles anticipated and real obstacles and threats encountered in in real life and hindrances impediments and risks which are only anticipated all this plays out in dreams and the dream directs you as to the existence of these risks and dangers and threats and also guides you as to how to respond to these challenges how to resolve the conundrums that you faced with so you could conceive of dreams as a kind of virtual reality or simulator a training simulator in the brain there's a focus on tackling challenges finding or homing in on Solutions and alerting you especially alerting you to threats and dangers while you're with a narcissist in a shirt fantasy pay a lot of attention to your night nightmares and to your dreams they're trying desperately to tell you something use texts use therapies use friends family members to suggest possible interpret ations of your dreams this may trigger in you self-awareness and bring you out of the shared Fantasy by being able to observe it from the outside in evolutionary terms this hypothesis of the threat simulation uh dream theory uh makes a lot of sense because in our predecessors ancient human ancestors they lived under constant and immediate threats I don't know animal Predators human Rivals forces of nature natural disasters and so on it's always a threat somewhere and and so they needed to somehow process traits without disrupting their functioning during the day because if your functioning was disrupted during the day you were a dead ancient ancestor now today we are faced with a different array of threats we have predators we have climate change we have criminals I mean of course the modern environment is no less minacious and threatening than the than the ancient environment but the capacity of the brain to run simulations when faced with threat and danger Remains the Same and we're making use of this capacity the body does not distinguish between the stress and agitation caused by thinking about something uh and the stress and agitation caused by actually experiencing the event so when you imagine or anticipate a catastrophe when you catastrophize the reaction within the brain neurochemical blood flows activation of certain parts of the brain is identical to the reaction when you're act actually experiencing the traumatic event the same goes for sex by the way especially with men when they imagine sex when they when they look at sex on POR in pornography for example they experience it as real sex the brain is unable to tell the difference between imagining something and actually experiencing something when we are constantly anxious and worried our bodies take up residence in a flight or fight mode and dreams help us to somehow snap out of it and make the right decisions practice train for real life situations observe the shed fantasy via your dreams perhaps you are incapable of lucid dreaming but you're definitely capable of processing the extreme trauma abuse and threatening environment that is the narcissist dream is shared fantasy

Channel: Prof. Sam Vaknin

Views: 16,800

Keywords: narcissist, dream, interpretation, nightmare, false self, emotions, hope, fear, transformation, change, narcissism, abuse, intimacy, relationships, trauma, trust, love, ideal, partner, perfect, grandiosity, perception, reality, idealization, devaluation, psychological defense mechanisms, emotional regulation, object relations, internal, external, objects, narcissistic personality disorder, NPD, psychotherapy, self, ego, psychodynamics, shared fantasy, projection, narcissistic, npd, personality, stalking, entraining

Id: AaD51I3aKOo

Length: 34min 51sec (2091 seconds)

Published: Tue May 21 2024