When we transcend excessive fear and bring conscious awareness to our nightmares through waking dreamwork, and when we truly desire to learn and heal, we enable powerful transformation that can influence all areas of our life.
I have met plenty of people who self-medicate to suppress their nightmares. One young woman smokes pot and drinks wine every night to avoid the sleep paralysis incidents that plague her. She wants to stop this unhealthy habit but is too fearful of what the night may bring. People who work in the healthcare industry tell me patients ask them if there is a pill to stop their nightmares. There are so many desperate people out there looking for nightmare solutions. Usually they have no idea that working actively with nightmares for insight and healing can reduce nightmare frequency and enable wonderful and life-affirming transformation. A seventy-one-year-old woman, Margaret, kindly shared her eureka moment of how to handle her chronic nightmares:
For most of my adult life, I had nightmares starting at around twenty-five. My old nightmares usually involved someone chasing me and trying to kill me either with guns or knives, or a version of the out-of-control dream where I am in a car and going down a hill and the brakes fail. I have worked and worked to solve this situation. Finally, I have been nightmare-free for about nine months. How?
1. Sleep with a total darkening sleep mask
2. Sleep with silicone (swimmer’s) earplugs
3. Take 1.25 mg of Time Release Melatonin when I go to sleep
You may wonder why I’m only sharing Margaret’s nightmare solution at the very end of the book. Surely I could have spared myself a lot of work and saved you a lot of time by simply handing you this solution right at the start?
Hopefully you’ll have read deeply enough in this book to spot the flaw of this “solution.” It may provide a temporary nightmare band-aid and feel like a big relief, and I understand the need for relief, the need to be able to sleep without fear. But I invite you to consider what happens when we close our eyes so tightly that we can no longer see ourselves? What happens when we block up our ears so we can’t hear our inner voice? What happens when we pop pills so that we bypass or forget the powerful stories, warnings, and blessings our strongest dreams bring us?
I know that ostriches don’t actually bury their heads in the sand (although I do wonder how that myth got to be so well known!), but in any case, it never struck me as a wise response. When we know how to work with nightmares, we open the door to immense possibilities of healing, creativity, and clarity on everything from our intimate relationships to our life’s purpose. We don’t need to run from our “bad” dreams, hide, bury our head in the sand, and hope for the storm to pass. Ostriches can’t fly, but in dreams and imagination, we can. We can fly right into our stormiest dreams, engaging with love and compassion and awe in the face of such wild creativity and intense emotion, until we reach the calm eye of the storm. This is the place where we take stock, gather wisdom, and arm ourselves with the tools we need to fly back into life on powerful wings.
In every area of our lives, we get to choose how conscious we are. Some people sit on the lid of a seething emotional cauldron their entire lives, ignoring their dreams, nightmares, and deepest desires. This is their choice (although it may not feel like a choice to them). Others go to the opposite extreme, dissecting every morsel of their existence, analysing every damn thing until they drive themselves and the people around them crazy! We don’t need to get obsessive about dreams and nightmares. It’s entirely possible to give them more space in our hearts and welcome their guidance to whatever extent feels beneficial. The vital thing to remember is that we have a choice. We get to choose how we live this precious life of ours. On a global level, the more people there are in the world who work on healing their old wounds and conflicts, the happier and more harmonious the world will become.
In the course of reading this book, you’ve likely discovered more about the kind of sleeper and dreamer you are, the type of nightmares and scary sleep experiences you are prone to, why they occur, and how to work with them. If you’re serious about improving your dream life, you will have created a tailor-made, flexible Nightmare Solution Programme to reflect your unique needs and your preferred steps towards peaceful, healing sleep and wondrous dreams. You’ll find your dream life will begin to shift into new dimensions, so it’s wise to revisit the Nightmare Quiz now and then to check your current nightmare status and gather new practices and tips to help you as your journey into healthful sleep continues. Any practice in this book can be tweaked to personalise it so that it fully reflects your individual needs to maximise its effectiveness.
In The Art of Transforming Nightmares, we’ve explored how to transform a wide range of upsetting and disturbing sleep experiences, from recurring nightmares to those caused by trauma, and from frightening experiences of floating in nothingness in the lucid void to scary sleep paralysis visions. For all of these experiences and more, I have shared my best practical techniques to help you handle them and access their creative, healing, and spiritual gifts. We’ve discovered that nightmares act as red flags, shouting out, “Healing is needed!” We’ve looked at the thought-responsive nature of nightmares, and there is a strong focus throughout the book on releasing fear to enable us to dissolve inner blocks and benefit from the dazzling creativity and transformative power of dreams. We’ve encountered the four major steps in dreamwork: remembering our dreams, uncovering the message of the dream or nightmare, releasing fear and other unhelpful emotions, and taking positive action in our lives.
We’ve looked at how to unlock the symbolism of nightmare images, and we’ve familiarised ourselves with their incredibly alive energy, their metaphoric aptness, and their visceral emotions. We’ve looked at the storytelling power of nightmares, and how empowering it can be to change that story through waking dreamwork. We have explored the nature of lucid dreaming and seen how it can help us work with a nightmare while it’s actually happening. I’ve shared my original waking lucidity practices, such as Lucid Writing and the Lucid Imaging Nightmare Solution, which enable transformation by combining nightmare imagery with lucid awareness. Lucid dreaming may be the world’s most innovative and much-needed approach to insomnia. I hope those who try my Insomnia Freedom Technique will let me know how it plays out for them.
Creativity, healing, and transformation play a huge role in The Art of Transforming Nightmares, with practices on bringing healing imagery into the body, reentering nightmares safely to rehearse happier outcomes, and gathering courage in the scariest of dream environments. We’ve discovered how to do shadow work with nightmares and the value of employing different imaginative responses. Mythological nightmares, childhood nightmares, and lucid nightmares have been explored, along with how to enlist dream mentors and power animals for protection. We’ve stepped closer to our nightmare animals and flown with fire-breathing dream dragons, and we’ve heard dream warnings delivered by deceased loved ones. We’ve touched on suicide nightmares and learned how to navigate the lucid void and explore the beautiful nature of the Lucid Light. It’s been quite an adventure.
The various states of consciousness we’ve explored, from trance states to sleep paralysis, can be viewed as portals to profound levels of creativity, healing, and self-understanding. Nightmare work can help us expand our natural compassion and deepen our knowledge of the luminous nature of consciousness and our journey through life as spiritual beings.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the fiery energy of transformation present in many of the nightmares throughout this book. Writing this book was quite a ride! I sent out a call for nightmares … and they began to pour in. It felt as if I activated a volcano churning with nightmares, ran from the scalding stream, and was then buried in it. But when I stood up in the lava stream and channelled the flow of liquid fire into my book, things got really crazy: the writing began to move very fast, and astonishing synchronicities occurred as warmhearted people sent me new nightmares that fitted exactly with what I was writing at the very moment I got their message. It was a transformative process, with volcanic energy. This book is pure alchemy, with the raw material of people’s worst nightmares turning into the gold of wisdom and healing. It isn’t me who is the alchemist here; it’s the brave people who worked on their nightmares and generously shared their process with me. They are the beating heart of this book. I am grateful to all those who kindly shared with me the best and worst of their nightmares to help others see the scope and potential of so-called “bad” dreams.
I’m also grateful to my magnificent dream tigers who showed me the way through the writing. At one point, I walked into an entire cave full of tigers who prowled around me, and one breathed warm, gentle breath onto the back of my neck! It’s thrilling when they come that close. Aren’t dreams wonderful? I hope that, having read this book, you know nightmares to be amazing gifts of the soul that we can work with for healing transformation.
Now that you’ve nearly reached the end of this book, the next steps are to keep engaging proactively and consciously with your dreams and nightmares, night after night! Dreams are honest mirrors, and your dream life reflects the inner work you do. Once you start putting the principles of this book into action, by doing dreamwork to transform your fears and heal your wounds, and by allowing your dreaming mind to become your new best friend, you will notice changes for sure. You may find that animal allies show up in a constant stream to lend you strength and support. While I grappled with the volcanic energy of this book through the dark winter months, some of the animals who came to me in my dreams were a tame silver wolf with amber eyes; a white owl as tall as my shoulder; a baby tiger; seven large and mysterious mythological birds with curved beaks; a blue-eyed husky as large as a bear; a whole cave of prowling adult tigers; and a wild, lithe leopard with a lush pelt who morphed into a little boy.
There was a lot of shapeshifting in my dreams and in my dreamwork as I worked with all of the transformative nightmare energies in this book. I experienced drumming journeys where I spontaneously morphed into a mermaid, a tiger, and a golden eagle. Despite all of the nightmare material I was engrossed in each day, I had no nightmares myself while working on this book. Perhaps I was so flooded by other people’s nightmares that my dreams compensated by sending me a menagerie of power animals instead.
As you befriend your dreams and nightmares and give them an honoured role in your life, you might notice an increase in experiences of light and happiness in any (or every!) state of consciousness, as well as an abundance of spiritual dreams, or dreams where knowledge is shared with you. For example, in one memorable dream, I was alone in a white room with a woman who was singing an achingly sad song that I resonated with on a deep emotional level. She walked right up to me and I gazed into her beautiful amber eyes … and suddenly, her two eyes merged into one massive third eye! I was awed and highly conscious as her third eye beamed knowledge into me. At the end, there was a burst of light that went right into my heart. I woke slowly with this light tangibly present in my heart and the knowledge that we are all made of light.
When working with nightmares in imaginative and fearless ways becomes natural to you, you may discover that as soon as a dream threatens to become a nightmare, your lucidity levels automatically rise. You might notice that you have the awareness to react in healing, accepting, or empowering ways within that would-be nightmare, and this can lead to enlightening moments. For example, in the following dream, you’ll see that at the tipping point when the dream could have become a screaming nightmare, instead of being consumed by fear, I became lucid. This lucidity jolt in the face of unease or anxiety has long been a typical reaction for me.
I’m in a luminous cave with a crystal-clear lake, when suddenly I see a massive green snake coiled on some rocks to my left. It’s watching me from very conscious black eyes.
“Hmm,” I think. “That’s a big snake!”
I realise I need to get my little daughter safely out of the cave. But as we’re leaving the cave, I’m aware that the snake is gliding towards me! My unease rises.
The moment the snake touches my back, three things happen. First, I become lucid, so I relax, ready to embrace the experience. Second, I realise the snake hasn’t come to hurt me. It doesn’t want to bite me; it wants to share its power and knowledge with me. And the third thing is that when it touches me, there’s this incredible buzzing feeling that begins at the base of my spine and travels all the way up my spine, right up to the crown of my head, so the whole of my spine is buzzing with this energy. Then everything dissolves into blissful light.
I wake up and my spine is still buzzing with serpent energy.
This lucid kundalini snake dream caused transformative energy to rise up through my entire spinal cord, dissolving any blocks and releasing new energy. I was navigating a challenging situation at the time of the dream, and when I woke up, I acted with purpose and clarity to resolve that situation and manifest something new. Things ended up resolving so much better than I could have imagined: I ended up signing two book deals with Llewellyn Worldwide within the space of two weeks! One was The Art of Lucid Dreaming, and—you guessed it—the other is its dark and luminous twin: The Art of Transforming Nightmares.
Would-be nightmares spontaneously change in marvellous ways when we have a habit of working closely and intuitively with our dreams. The more we listen to our dreams and nightmares, the more clarity we get on our life’s purpose and how to manifest our best gifts to help others and create the life we’d love to live.
Sleep is a threshold we cross alone each night. I hope very much that this book helps you cross that threshold fearlessly, in the knowledge that you can remain calm and act with power in any sleep state and that you fully deserve a happy, enriching night of dreams.
I’ll say it one final time, though: nightmares are gifts.
Yes, we all know that the wrapping paper can be pretty nasty, but when we gather our courage and unwrap a nightmare, we reveal its creative, healing, and transformative gold. Nightmare work is an alchemical art, and when we become adept at transforming nightmares into the gold of the soul, we free ourselves to step with wonder into a bolder, brighter life.
I wish you courage on your journey!