Recurring nightmares have been problems for millions of individuals over the years. While he mind and dreaming remains one of the major mysteries of science and of life, one of the major causes of nightmares is stress. The reason for this is that stress affects your body physically, causing hormonal changes and imbalances in your body.

In everyone's body the physical, mental, and emotional is all connected, and this is why too much stress can cause physical and mental ailments. Dreams are funny things, and often nightmares are the subconscious mind's way of warning you about things going on in your life that you may or may not even be aware of.

Stress affects you mind, and this stress can come from many different areas. Stress from being unemployed or laid off can cause nightmares because of the constant fears of not being able to provide for yourself or others. There can also be "hidden" stress, like many students have before graduating college.

The pending moment of complete and total change can be stressful even for college students who have a job, career, or marriage lined up. Changes of this magnitude, even the good ones, cause major subconscious stress which is often translated into strange and bizzare dreams or even nightmares.

Having a dream interpretation book can sometimes help, because many nightmares are very symbolic. It can be extremely weird how this works, but for many people symbols in the dreams mean the same thing.

One common shared example are snake nightmares. Normally nightmares about snakes aren't nightmares just because that person is afraid of snakes, but snakes can represent hidden dangers or fears that a person hasn't dealt with or even noticed consciously. If a familiar person appears in a dream when a snake bites the dreamer, that is often a warning that the person is dangerous, maybe they shouldn't be trusted.

How can dreams know this? The subconscious mind might see all the warning signs from the way a person acts, but the conscious mind hasn't picked up on those clues.

Major stress can cause nightmares to be reoccurring, and often this is actually the case with these types of nightmares. If you can interpret these nightmares, it may give a clue to what stress is physically affecting your health the most, giving you a way to deal with the nightmares by dealing with the cause.

Reoccurring nightmares almost always have a cause rooted in your actual waking life. Figure out those causes, and you have the information that you need to hopefully deal with the stresses of life and get a good night's sleep.

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Originally published first at ezinearticles based on information from my hub at HubPages before being published here - all of which is original material.