Experts reveal how certain dreams could signal illness before symptoms appear

An expert has explored how having certain dreams could be a sign of an underlying health condition.

Dreams are one of the more esoteric parts of being a person, and there are any number of theories about what they might mean, or if they mean anything at all!

It might be anxious dreams about missing your final exams, even though you're now in your 30s, or being chased by something but somehow your feet are sticking to the floor and you can't run away.

On the other hand, you might have more pleasant dreams, or ones that can't even be put into words because they're so abstract.

But according to experts experiencing certain kinds of dreams could be a sign of an underlying health problem, so it's worth watching out.

Dreams can get very weird sometimes (Anastasiia Voloshko/Getty)

Professor Patrick McNamara is a psychologist at Boston University School of Medicine, and specialises in studying sleep.

Speaking to the Daily Mail, he said: "The brain is constantly monitoring signals from the body's internal organs to keep our physiological systems in balance."

Often when someone is going through a particular period of stress or anxiety then their sleep quality might be affected by this.

They might also experience bad dream more often, or in greater intensity than they might usually expect.

But now it's been theorized that spells of certain bad dreams might even be the body's way of signalling that something is wrong before we even realize.

Explaining the signals that the brain monitors, Professor McNamara said: "These signals are integrated in paralimbic regions such as the anterior insula, which track the body's internal state.

"During REM sleep the brain effectively compresses and synthesises this information, producing a kind of snapshot of what's happening inside the body."

Dreams might mean more than you think (Maskot/Getty)

The sort of dreams have been called 'prodromal dreams', and could mean a lot of different illnesses.

"When we are talking about prodromal dreams though, we are not just talking about serious life threatening illnesses, they could also come before a cold or the flu,' said Professor McNamara.

But what sort of things might we want to watch out of in our dreams?

"Dreams that are detecting threats are often presented in similar ways," Professor McNamara explained.

"One of them is that there will be unwarranted aggression from somebody towards the dreamer, it may seem unusual but it is a metaphorical signal from the body.

"The other strong signal is the appearance of male strangers, who are mildly threatening."