Do we grow out of nightmares?

[Retro*Derpy 3,192]

I'd say no, some people do but it can really depend on your state of mind and what you eat matters too. 

[EpicEnergy 23,224]

Not me, I still sometimes have tornado nightmares that started in my childhood.

[returned_dragon 136]

Maybe, and maybe not.

The clinical definition of a nightmare is a dream that is so frightening or intense that it causes you to wake up. What the average person would describe as a 'nightmare' may or may not really be one in the strictest sense from what I understand. 

Did you know that people who would be objectively described as being more positive in their dispositions and in-touch with their emotions report more nightmares than others? You would think that this is kind of a paradox, but there seems to be at least some suggestion that they are just better able to distinguish negative dream content from neutral dream content. One man's nightmare is just an ordinary dream for some. 

Adolescents report the highest number of intense dreams which makes sense to me when you factor in what is taking place in their maturation. People who are 60-70+ tend to just have fewer dreams at all for the most part, and probably for the opposite reason. 

Although the how and why of dreams is far from being understood, one thing that is interesting to me is the idea that memories in your brain are chemically stored and sorted with "tags" of a sort. I don't know how or why, but it's almost like when your brain starts trying to decide what it is going to dream about that night, it kind of shuffles the deck so to speak. More intense/traumatic/familiar experiences tend to come up more often than others.