Trauma-related nightmares (TRNs) are a phenomenon where memory, sleep and suffering converge in episodes marked by vivid imagery, abrupt awakenings and the echo of past trauma. Despite their frequency and clinical impact, TRNs have resisted precise classification, blurring lines between pathology, sleep disturbance and memory—resulting in conceptual inconsistencies this review aims to resolve. Given their complexity, TRNs must be investigated across clinical, phenomenological and physiological dimensions, combining patient narratives with objective sleep and autonomic markers. This review clarifies their conceptual status and introduces a typology grounded in trauma replication and the interplay between content, frequency and distress. It examines identification through patient reports and physiological recordings, with ecological studies challenging traditional models and providing an empirical basis for a new integrative framework. TRNs are best understood within the vulnerability cycle—a dynamic interaction involving environmental triggers, emotional dysregulation and sleep fragmentation that sustains recurrence. These nightmares reflect and reinforce psychiatric and physiological fragilities, with consequences carrying over throughout the night and into the next day. Treating TRNs requires more than symptomatic relief. It calls for integrative strategies and conceptual frameworks—such as the DIA-TRNs model—that conceptualize TRNs as dynamic processes evolving from Disruption, through Integration of traumatic memories during sleep, toward Adaptation.
Feingold et al. (Sun,) studied this question.