Sleep is designed to rest and restore strength. Unfortunately, this is not always the case: a person can wake up “broken” and completely unrefreshed. This happens after nightmares, and one of the most unpleasant "stories" is the persecution.
Anyone can chase 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.
There is currently no shortage of dream books offering all sorts of interpretations of such dreams. Even the details are being clarified, to which the persecuting law enforcement officers dream, and to what - the "mad donkey". Scientific psychology does not take such "logical constructions" seriously, but it can say a lot about the true causes of such nightmares.
From the point of view of psychology, the pursuit in a dream is a manifestation of anxiety, a sense of insecurity that a person experiences in real life. Perhaps the person suspects that he is in danger, but these conjectures, like all unpleasant thoughts, are forced out into the realm of the unconscious, so that they can then appear in a dream.
Not always a traumatic situation refers to the present - in a dream, fear experienced in the past and also crowded out into the realm of the unconscious can return. For example, in one woman, dreams in which she ran away from a man chasing her were associated with memories of a former cohabitant, who was a real "house tyrant."
From the standpoint of gestalt therapy, a direction in psychotherapy based on expanding self-awareness, the role of a persecutor in a dream may not be an external threat, but something that a person fears in himself: aggression, hatred of someone, desire for revenge and others motives that a person considers unacceptable and suppresses.
Dreams in which the pursuer catches up with the sleeper and hurts him require special attention. In a dream, the images and sensations preserved by the memory are actualized, and the memory never retains pain 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 the hidden stage of a disease. From medical practice, a case is known when a dog pursued a person in a dream and finally bit her leg, and after some time an ulcer appeared on the leg. As it turned out, the dream took place against the background of a latent stage of anthrax in skin form.
If the stalker is strangling, it means that the sleeping person has difficulty breathing. The reason may be situational - the sleeping person buried his nose in the pillow, the room was not aired, but if such dreams are repeated 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 and do not even see him in a dream in a dream, usually describing them as “someone dark, ” who comes down from above or stands nearby, preventing them from turning. Such dreams in heart patients are always accompanied by a fear of death.