The nightmare where I was being chased through endless corridors felt more real than any beautiful dream I’ve ever had, more convincing than the pleasant fantasy where I was flying over sunlit meadows, more visceral than the blissful dream where I was reunited with people I love. Terror, it seems, has more weight than joy, more gravity than beauty, more power to convince the sleeping mind that what’s happening is actually happening.
Fear writes itself into the body with permanent ink while joy uses disappearing ink. The nightmare leaves me gasping, heart pounding, sheets soaked with sweat—physical evidence that my body believed completely in the danger that existed only in my mind. But beautiful dreams leave barely a trace, fading so quickly I can rarely remember what made them beautiful, dissipating like vapor while the nightmare’s details remain sharp and accessible days later.
Maybe this is evolutionary wisdom: the brain that remembers threats survives longer than the brain that remembers pleasures. Nightmares feel real because they need to feel real—they’re training exercises for actual danger, rehearsals for scenarios where the difference between dream and reality could determine survival. Beautiful dreams can afford to feel fantastical because they serve different purposes: rest, restoration, wish fulfillment.
But there’s something deeper at work here. Fear has a quality of immediacy that joy often lacks. When we’re afraid, we become completely present—alert, focused, unable to think about anything except the threat at hand. Joy, by contrast, often comes with the awareness that it won’t last, the knowledge that this too will pass, a meta-consciousness that reminds us we’re experiencing something temporary.
The nightmare convinces because it demands total belief. There’s no part of the dreaming mind that can afford to doubt the reality of the danger—doubt would mean death. But beautiful dreams invite a kind of floating awareness, a gentle suspension of disbelief that acknowledges its own artificiality.
Maybe this is why we wake up from nightmares feeling traumatized by experiences that never happened, while we wake up from beautiful dreams feeling only the gentle melancholy of loss. The nightmare colonizes reality; the beautiful dream admits it was always just visiting.
Tonight I practice remembering that the vividness of fear doesn’t make it more true than the subtlety of joy, that the weight of nightmares doesn’t make them more real than the lightness of beautiful dreams.
