Why Dreams are Important (even dreams of fear)

The funny thing about dreams is that your brain forces you to face what you suppress while awake. Dreaming is like your own personal therapist in a way because you face the things you won't face in waking moments. Your dreams are an open dialogue into your life. 

This is great because if we evolved without the ability to dream, I bet we wouldn't feel the need to face our fears or problems without the little push from our dreams.

Sometimes I get happy dreams and here's a representation of them:

But sometimes, the dreams I dream are about things I'm afraid of. The act of dreaming lets you experience facing your fears, though I think the fact that you don't expect the dreams to hit you so hard kind of takes away from the good of facing your fears because you wake up terrified and disturbed. Maybe I'm just easily scared.

I have a theory about dreams of fear. I believe these dreams happen to help you recognize the parts of your life in which you lack control over. Your fears and the problems you are not addressing are manifested in your dreams, because although you don't need to think about issues in your life while awake, you cannot hide from your inner concerns while you're asleep. That's a little scary and off-putting to know that you don't have control over what you dream of, but it's also comforting because you're never going to be left unaware of your fears and problems!

I find it funny that you can't hide from your true self; though you can suppress your worries and problems in consciousness, your brain knows what you're dealing with inside. Basically, you can't lie to yourself. Your dreams, as scary as they may be, are meant to make you see that your fears are not as scary as they seem or on the other hand, your dreams are meant to make you realize that you do have problems and you can't just ignore them. I guess dreaming makes you more responsible. 

As a child, I used to dream a lot about being left alone / abandoned or being in a dangerous situation. Now, I dream a whole lot about being followed, taken and almost killed...real life scenarios. Those type of dreams are extremely vivid and leave me with a ton of fear. Sometimes I wake up yelling because in the last part of my dream, I'm trying to express my discomfort. I've dreamt of being robbed at night. I've dreamt of weird individuals coming up to my car window, usually one individual. One of these car dreams a man put his arm through the gapping window, trying to reach for me or unlock the door. My brother finds himself in my dreams quite often as well. Tom, my boyfriend, too. I dream myself into just very strange occurrences that freak me out. It's not a surprise that I dream of real life situations where I'm in danger because to be quite fair, I am a scaredy cat. I jump when someone comes around the corner and I don't see them coming. I don't like being the last one up at night because it's too quiet and I get scared while trying to fall asleep. As a child, I required a night light up until probably 7th grade / 8th grade. Also, I would say I'm a creative person, and I've read that people who are creative tend to dream more vividly and have bad dreams. I think my imagination is vast, so my dreams are going to be as insane as the range of my imagination.