By Ian Randall For Mailonline
Published: 18:00 BST, 15 April 2019 | Updated: 19:05 BST, 15 April 2019
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The secret of why we have angry dreams may finally have been found by scientists studying our brains as we sleep.
Experts found an imbalance between two regions of the brain found on both the left and right sides is to blame for the unsettling nightmares.
A tell-tale sign is an effect called frontal alpha asymmetry, where a specific type of brain activity is higher in one side of the brain.
The findings come from studies of 17 healthy volunteers who had their brains scanned before, during and after sleep.
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After they had experienced a five-minute bout of REM sleep, the researchers awoke sleeping participants and asked them to describe the dreams they had been having and rate the emotions they had experienced within such. (Stock image)
Researchers from the UK, Finland and Sweden looked at how our brains regulate emotions like anger and curiosity when we are dreaming at night.
Study participants spent two nights in a sleep laboratory, where researchers took electroencephalographic (or EEG) recordings of their brain activity for short periods before, during and after slumber.
Among the volunteers were 7 men and 10 women, all of whom were healthy.
Experts found that participants who experienced less brain activity in their right frontal cortex rather than its left-hand counterpart while they were awake and during REM sleep experienced more anger in their dreams.
'It has been shown that expressing anger is related to relatively greater left [frontal activity], whereas controlling anger is related to relatively greater right frontal activity,' said lead author Pilleriin Sikka, a researcher at University of Turku in Finland.
'Anger was experienced in 41 per cent of dreams, interest in 88 per cent of dreams.
'Participants
