what Are Nightmares And How Can tHey Help Us?
Sleeping and dreaming are incredibly interlinked and overlapping states. Even waking and dreaming are not two separate things! In fact, there is no state of consciousness that is ever completely separate from any other state. How could there be? If we are having a hard time in our nighttime world, it’s likely that our daytime world is adversely impacted, too. Our physical, mental, and emotional selves are instantly affected by just one sleepless night. When we suffer from recurring nightmares or are attacked by faceless monsters in sleep paralysis, or when we don’t get enough deep, restful sleep because we’re scared to fall asleep, you can bet that our cognitive abilities, short-term memory, emotional resilience, empathy, and overall happiness levels plummet. The good news is that there are many simple, practical ways of working with unpleasant sleep experiences that can help us transform our dream life and regain the bliss of serene, nourishing sleep.
What Are Nightmares?
The Art of Transforming Nightmares employs a broad definition of the term nightmare. In this book, a nightmare is any upsetting, fearful, or distressing experience that occurs during sleep, which means that we are going to focus on much more than those terrifying nightmares that cause us to wake up screaming. As far as this book is concerned, the term nightmare also encompasses harrowing sleep paralysis visions and sensations, scary out-of-body experiences, grotesque pre-sleep imagery, fearful episodes of floating lost in the black void, sleep disturbances, uncontrollable lucid nightmares, or any dream that troubles us or leaves us feeling anxious or depressed. While unpleasant nightmares and anxiety dreams are fairly common and can usually be worked on with relative ease, chapter 6 of this book also attends to more severe nightmares caused by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The severity of PTSD and trauma-related nightmares can overwhelm and impede our natural self-healing process, so they can require a specialised therapeutic approach and greater support.
Dreams and nightmares are honest mirrors, showing us how we really feel about life, relationships, and ourselves. This book shares how to engage with nightmares in transformative and lucid ways, how to dissolve fear, how to receive precious messages and spiritual gifts from our unconscious mind, and how to use our new awareness to guide us into a fearless and wonderful life.
One important maxim I’d like to share is that even the worst nightmares carry healing, creative, and spiritual gifts. I’d even go so far as to say that especially the worst nightmares can bring us these precious gifts, because they have so much energy! Dreams and nightmares speak to us in the language of the soul. The greater the need of the soul to communicate with us, the greater the potential for healing transformation. Our goal, then, is to find the gifts within our nightmares and distressing sleep experiences, and to understand how these gifts can empower and heal us in our waking life.
Why Do We Have Nightmares?
Fight-or-flight reactions occur in an ancient part of our brain, the amygdala, also known as our “emotional accelerator.” In the past, if we were walking through a forest and met up with an angry bear, the amygdala would help us survive by creating a sense of extreme fear and urgency, so that we would either fight the bear or run away to save our lives. These days, our stressors are very different: we miss the train we needed to catch to get to an important meeting, or we have to sit an exam we don’t feel prepared for. Although not life-threatening, such situations can trigger the same existential fear in the brain because the amygdala makes no distinction between a death threat and other stressors. Then there are also unresolved traumatic experiences we had in the past that have left a memory of fear embedded deep in our brain. During dreaming, this fearful raw material can become magnified into scary imagery.
Because of the zany, creative nature of the dreaming mind, the scary dream may contain comic or ludicrous elements (the train we miss turns into a golden hedgehog that chases our boss), or there may be resolution within the dream story (to our amazement, the dreaded exam question only asks us to draw a rainbow, and we happily get out our colouring pencils and do so). This is great because it means that we are processing our fears and making sense of the situations we have lived through in a healthy way. We release excess fear and resolve our life issues by dealing with them in our dreams. But sometimes the fear gets out of control and becomes amplified into a terrifying nightmare.
In the case of such a nightmare, our overflowing fears and emotions are usually not resolved within the dream story; instead, we wake up flooded with dread, our heart pumping. When this happens, we have received a loud and clear message from our unconscious that here is an issue we need to resolve. Nightmares are red flags that point to the areas within our psyche that need healing. Distressing dreams are an invitation to heal from the past, create positive action in the present, and brave up for the future. When we work with distressing dreams, we can complete the process of resolution, insight, and healing.
Imagine your dreaming mind as a kind mermaid who swims up from the depths of your unconscious and approaches you with love, holding something in her two hands. When she reaches you, the mermaid says, “This needs healing.” Her eyes are compassionate—she knows how hard this is going to be for you, but she needs to bring your attention to what she’s holding. You look down … and in her hands you see the most repellent, ugly, wriggling nightmare. Instantly, you are engulfed with awful emotions: guilt, dread, and a deep distaste. Your instinct is to walk away—who wants to get involved with something so repulsive? You force yourself awake and try to shrug off the images you just saw. But the next night, the kind mermaid returns and she’s still carrying the damn nightmare, which is bigger and stronger than it was before, thrashing around hideously in her arms. With a rush of clarity, you realise that you need to face this monstrosity before it gets even bigger.
This is what our dreaming mind does when it produces nightmares: it brings our attention to what needs healing within us.
How Does a Dream Turn into a Nightmare?
Imagine a young parrot who flies into a hall of mirrors. Since she has no idea about the nature of mirrors and the visual effects of bulging reflective surfaces, she is terrified to find herself face-to-face with grotesque parrots with massive heads and distorted beaks, and freakishly long-necked parrots with rolling eyeballs. As her fear skyrockets, the creatures become mythical: here is a griffin, swooping with outstretched claws; there is a wild-eyed harpy, a warped and deformed phoenix … The more the parrot opens her beak and shrieks in horror, the wider these ugly beings open their massive jaws! As she flees the hall in panic, a pterodactyl keeps perfect pace with her …
Outside in the cool air, the parrot feels powerfully relieved when none of the monstrous birds follow her. The pterodactyl who seemed to be flying out too has vanished—how come? Now comes her moment of lucidity: she realises that those birds were silent and she never felt the flap of their wings. She realises that despite their weirdness, they looked uncannily like her and even sported the same smart cap of green feathers! Feeling calm and brave and curious, she flutters back into the hall of mirrors, and as she approaches the first mirror, she understands that these birds are reflections of herself! Now she is able to look into the mirror with full awareness and laugh at the funny images and enjoy this shapeshifting game.
Dreams are mirrors.
Through our dreams, we get to see ourselves as if gazing through a distorted but honest mirror. Dreams reflect back to us our hidden hopes, our shortcomings, our inner beauty, our obsessions, our worst fears, and our strengths.
Crucially, dreams are thought-responsive environments.
This means that our thoughts and feelings, as well as our intentions and expectations, are conveyed seamlessly to our dreaming mind in a beautiful telepathic communication. And dreaming is a conversation, so the dream responds. If we are alone in an old house in our dream and we think, “This might be a haunted house!” the dream may well rattle up some ghostly chains in response, or we may see a translucent figure gliding by … And, of course, if we then panic in our dream and allow fear to rise within us, well, things could get truly nasty—the ghostly figure rushes towards us, shrieking like a banshee with glowing evil eyes … yikes! We wake up bathed in sweat. Our out-of-control fear turned what could have been a relaxing dream about exploring an old house (and maybe finding hidden treasures) into a full-blown nightmare.
In the dream state, we have to be super mindful about our fear. We need to bring our awareness to the fear, panic, distress, or horror, and remind ourselves that we are safe and will wake up safely in our bed after this experience. We can take measures to calm down and protect ourselves, as in Practice 1: How to Release Fear and Become Calm and Practice 36: Invoke Protective Powers: Ball of Light.
In dreams, as in waking life, when it comes to emotions, there is a tipping point. Up until a certain moment, the dream is not a nightmare. There may be low levels of anxiety present, but things are okay. However, if we get too caught up in the feeling of anxiety (or fear, or dread), then we quickly reach the tipping point where the thought-responsive dream environment creates upsetting imagery in response to our emotional input, and the dream turns into a nightmare. One father dreamed he was exploring a wildlife park with his young daughter. There were animals roaming free and it was fine until he noticed that night was starting to fall. The dreamer’s anxiety rose: darkness was coming and wild animals were all around. Because of this increase in anxiety, the dream responded with something far worse: the dreamer noticed his daughter had disappeared! Now frantic, he ran around looking for her while his fear further amplified the dream story and soon his worst fears were realised: a man told him two people had kidnapped his daughter. Assailed by an overwhelming feeling of despair, he awoke.
The tipping point in this dream—the moment it morphed into a nightmare—was when night began to fall, causing fear to rise in the dreamer. Fuelled by this fear, the dream story then escalated into a harrowing nightmare. It’s really helpful for nightmare sufferers to practise calming techniques during the day so that it becomes automatic to breathe and calm down whenever we feel stressed, both in waking life and in dreams. This simple technique is easy to get the hang of.
how to release fear and become calm
Releasing fear is essential for us to deepen our connection with life. When we go through life with fear in our hearts, we obscure our own magnificence and distance ourselves from joy. We feel unsafe in the world. But you have a right to feel safe, in your body and in your life. Remember that you are a powerful spiritual being and the entire universe supports you. You belong here. You have the right to be alive; you have your place in the universe just as the stars and the oceans do. This is your earth to walk on. This is your air and you have the right to breathe it.
Your breath is your lifeline and your path to feeling safe. Whether awake or asleep, you can always influence the depth and regularity of the breaths you take. There is nothing to fear in any state of consciousness because ultimately, everything is one. When you cultivate a feeling of safety, you gift yourself with a huge amount of tranquil power. This breathing exercise can be practised by day and used whenever needed to bring your fear and anxiety levels down and induce calmness:
• Take a few moments each day to practise this relaxing breathing rhythm: Close your eyes and inhale for four seconds. Hold your breath without effort for four seconds, then exhale for six seconds. Keep your focus on this 4-4-6 rhythm until it feels easy and natural. Adjust it if you need to.
• Now keep the rhythm going without actively counting the seconds. Each time you breathe in, think, “I am calm” or “I am safe.” As you retain your breath, feel that sense of calm and safety infuse your mind and body. When you breathe out, think, “I release fear.” Keep this mantra going as you continue to breathe in a relaxed and rhythmic way.
• Really feel the sensation of calm spread throughout your entire body, through all your cells and muscles, as if light is infusing you. Feel this calmness fill your mind and body from head to toe.
• If you have any difficulty in cultivating calmness, it can be helpful to summon a memory of a moment when you experienced deep peace and total safety, and focus on reexperiencing this moment with all of your senses.
• Once you feel completely calm, remind yourself that you can use your breath to reach this peaceful state whenever you need to, both in waking life and in dreams and nightmares. This calmness is always present within you. When you’re ready, open your eyes and smile!
During a nightmare (or in a dream reentry exercise), you can use this breathing technique to remind you that you are safe and that after this experience you will wake up safely in your bed.
Four Steps in Transformative Nightmare Work
Working with nightmares can be very simple—we recall the events and imagery, figure out the symbolism, release fear, and then act on the wisdom of the nightmare to create positive change in our lives. There are four major steps in healing, transformative nightmare work:
1. Remember our dreams. The first major step is simply remembering our dreams. Most nightmare sufferers don’t have a problem recalling what happened during the night, but if you’d like to improve your dream recall, try Practice 2: Keep a Nightmare Journal (later in this chapter). When we recall our dreams and nightmares, we shine the light of awareness onto them and let them know that we value them and are listening to what they have to say.
2. Uncover the message. The second step is uncovering the message of the nightmare—what it’s about and what it wants to tell us. In Chapter 2, we’ll look at the language of dreams and nightmares and how to decipher the symbolism.
3. Release fear and other unhelpful emotions. The third step is to work with the nightmare to release fear and other difficult emotions that may be holding us back in life and to integrate whatever we need for healing resolution. There are many practices in this book that help you work with nightmares in transformative ways.
4. Take positive action. The final step is to take positive action in our lives based on what our dream is saying to us. Dreams and nightmares show us how we really feel about a situation. They show us probable outcomes and worst-case scenarios, and they offer solutions.
What Happens When We Ignore Nightmares?
When we ignore nightmares, they return in a different form or they repeat in every detail, slapping us with their message until we react. Unfortunately, many people react by becoming frightened to sleep lest the nightmare return. This is a terrible pity, as it blows their much-needed recuperation time out of the water. When people have been in this state of terror and suffering a lack of solid sleep for a while, they find themselves unable to regain their strength, and they may become exhausted, depressed, physically ill, or even suicidal. Severe nightmare sufferers write to me saying, “I think I’m going crazy,” “I feel like I won’t survive this,” or “Please help me get my life back.”
If you find yourself feeling this desperate about your nightmares, as a first step, please get professional help immediately. Some nightmares should not be worked on alone! Talk to your doctor or see a therapist who works with dreams, trauma, and nightmares. Some people spend a night being monitored in a sleep lab and discover that their nightmares are caused by a mild sleep disturbance and can be easily treated. Others may discover that there is a past trauma at the root of their nightmares, and can work on this at their own pace with a therapist. Still others may be advised by their doctor to take antidepressants, which may have the side effect of suppressing dream recall. Medication may well be a useful sticking plaster for desperate times, but in the long term, often the only way to reach a lasting, satisfying, and healthy solution is to create a safe space within which to face the nightmare and unwrap it to reveal its gifts.
Our dreams are part of us—we are the dream and it is us. But this also means that we are the nightmare and it is us! Nightmares can be thought of as a part of ourselves that hasn’t yet healed properly. They are a red flag that shouts, “Healing is needed!” Nightmares are healing gifts. They may come in ugly wrapping paper, but when we calm our fears and open them up with full lucid awareness, we are gifted with wisdom, transformation, and healing. We are not as helpless as we might think. We are much more powerful than we know. We can change our lives for the better. Every one of us has the inner resources to be able to heal ourselves. It’s true. We just need to know how to access this healing so that we can transform our lives—and the lives of others—for the better.
keep a nightmare journal
Keeping a nightmare journal is the number-one practice for empowering ourselves when engaging with nightmares, as it helps us identify common themes and emotions, and we begin to understand the message behind our worst dreams. It also makes the powerful move of showing our dreaming mind that we are listening to it and are open to its wisdom. Since nightmares are pure creative energy, writing them down also enables us to connect with their creative power, and we can work with this in exciting ways to harness that wild, raw energy (as shown in Practice 19: Artistic Nightmare Options for Adults and Kids and Practice 43: Turn Mythological Beasts into Protective Allies).
Nightmares often come in sequences, like the next instalment in a soap opera (or a horror series). As our emotions and situation shift over time, we receive new nightmares that show our progression. One woman who lost all her worldly possessions had recurring nightmares about endless hardship, poverty, and suffering. But the nightmares depicted a gradual shift as her attitude of helplessness changed into one of inner strength. In the final nightmare of the series, she was struggling up a mountain in bad weather with other refugees when suddenly the ground levelled off and the sun came out, giving them all a feeling of hope.
Nightmares that change from difficult to easy, or from dark to light, reflect positive shifts within our psyche, such as a change in our attitude or a new feeling of empowerment and resilience. When we change on the inside, our outer, waking life changes accordingly and things improve, often with surprising speed. Keeping a nightmare journal with spaces for sketches and life context can give you clarity because it helps you spot patterns in your nightmares and see where you are, psychologically and emotionally, at this moment in your life.
• Find an unlined notebook so you can add sketches, or use your phone to record your dreams vocally if you prefer.
• Try to wake up without an alarm clock or wake up slowly to music. This allows you to stay in your sleep position with closed eyes and think back over your night of sleep and dreams. Your overall dream recall will improve. (It’s nice to remember not only nightmares but the beautiful or fun dreams as well!)
• Whenever you wake up in the night, ask yourself these questions: “What was I just dreaming about?” “Who was I with?” “How was I feeling?” The better your dream recall is, the broader your picture of your dreaming mind will become.
• Keep your nightmare journal right by your bed and write in it even if all you recall is a feeling of unease or dread, with no imagery. If you awaken from a nightmare in the night and don’t want to disturb your bed partner, either leave the bedroom to write or whisper your nightmare into a recording device. If the nightmare was very upsetting, do take a moment to unwind from it with a few deep breaths and reassure yourself that you are safe. Remind yourself that, horrendous though it may be, this nightmare has come to help and heal you!
• Use the present tense when writing your nightmares: “A black swan lunges at my throat …” “The spaceship fires laser beams at our house …” This tense helps to retain the immediacy and emotional impact of the nightmare.
• Give your nightmare a title. This sums up the main action and makes it easier to identify different dreams when you glance back through your journal.
• Draw or sketch the main images from your nightmares to capture their energy. This makes it easier to do dream reentry practices, such as Practice 8: Reenter the Nightmare and Practice 16: Become the Monster.
• Note any associations or memories the nightmare brings up for you.
• Which emotions are present? Jot these down in the order in which they appear, such as “sadness, followed by disgust and fear.” When did you last experience these emotions in waking life?
• What is the context of the nightmare: is there any connection with events in your waking life?
• Be a nightmare detective: Once you have recorded a few nightmares, look back over your journal and ask yourself, “Which stories do my nightmares tell?” Jot down recurring themes or images.
• What is the timing for these nightmares? Do they occur when you are stressed or after you’ve been out partying? Do you often have a nightmare after seeing a particular person? Try to find links to waking-life events and emotions.
Keeping a nightmare journal (and jotting down pleasant, nonscary dreams as well) gives us a fascinating glimpse into our state of mind. It’s easier to do transformative work with a range of different nightmares when we have them readily available to us as written accounts with sketches, associations, and context, so that we can chart their progression and add new insights to them as we go along.
Emotional Detachment from Nightmare Imagery
A nightmare is often defined by the strength of the emotions it triggers. One person described a recurring dream of floating in a large cube. “How peaceful!” we might think. But no, for him this was a terrifying space. Sometimes the most horrific dream stories that cause others to flinch when they hear them are not perceived as being a nightmare by the dreamer. This is usually because there is not a strong emotion such as fear, disgust, or guilt present in the dream. Occasionally someone will share a dream with me that contains shocking or disturbing imagery, such as having their limbs torn off by soldiers and watching as their body parts are strewn around the street. Yet the dreamer will say this was not really a nightmare since although they now feel baffled and slightly concerned by the imagery, it didn’t upset them while they were in the dream.
There may be various reasons for this kind of emotional detachment from shocking dream imagery. Sometimes there is a past trauma that the person has unconsciously dissociated from, and this crops up in the form of disturbing dream imagery, but the emotional element has been frozen out of it to protect the dreamer from its impact. Other times it could be one of those “this is how you really feel!” dreams related to a current situation that we think we’re handling just fine, but when we unwrap the meaning of our dream, we realise it is telling us symbolically that on a deep, unconscious level, the situation we’re in is in fact making us feel “torn apart.”
Another possibility is that the dreamer watched a war movie the night before and this imagery seeped into their dreams. The emotional impact would be minimal, as the imagery doesn’t pertain to the dreamer’s life but rather to an artistic creation—the movie. Emotions (or a lack of them) are important to consider when it comes to any nighttime experience, from sleep paralysis to dreams. It’s also very valuable to work with the imagery to illuminate its meaning. There are many wonderful ways of illuminating nightmares, from the simplest method of asking “what was going on in your life at the time this nightmare occurred?” to deeper practices such as reentering the dream imaginatively with powerful allies and magical tools at hand, so that we feel equipped to meet our monsters, befriend angry dream bears, and dance with our demons.
When Are Nightmares Not about Personal Issues?
• When nightmares tap into a wider social dimension and reflect the state of the world or the collective human psyche. Apocalyptic nightmares sometimes—but not always—fall into this “social dreaming” category. Working with the dream allows us to figure out if this is a social dream or a personal one.
• When nightmares are triggered by medication, psychedelics, or other recreational drugs. If you suffer from nightmares, it’s wise to investigate any prescription drugs or plant/herbal remedies you’re taking, but only change your intake after consulting with your doctor.
• When nightmares are warnings of real-life events that are about to happen. Dreams are not bound by time in the way that our waking lives are, and sometimes people report precognitive nightmares, where a shocking or upsetting event occurs in the dream (such as a loved one dying in an accident) and then this actually happens in waking life. Chapter 8 explores such dreams. Please note that the majority of nightmares do not come true in this way, and death in dreams is usually symbolic of major change.
• When nightmares are caused by physical pain. We’ll take a look in Chapter 2 at how pain and discomfort can infiltrate our dreams to cause unpleasant streams of imagery.
• When we cause digestive mayhem by eating spicy foods, cheese, or gluten before bedtime. This is highly individual and may not be a problem for you at all, but it’s worth looking at what you ate before your last nightmare, to see if there’s any connection between uneasy dreams and an uneasy gut. Also check your coffee intake.
• When nightmares are caused by sleep paralysis. Chapter 7 explores sleep paralysis, which is when we feel trapped in our body, unable to move, and we often experience disturbing imagery and sensations.
• When nightmares are our response to a horror movie or psychological thriller we watched before bed. The dreaming mind is a skilled movie-maker: it pulls together daytime impressions, deep psychology, and pure creative imagery to create fabulous living stories. If we’ve just watched a horror movie, we may find elements from it infiltrate our dreams. Of course, looking at exactly which movie elements our dreaming mind focused on and why can reveal psychological insights, but there may be no particular message for us other than that we shouldn’t watch such films if we want sweet dreams!
Who Are You When You Dream?
This is a fascinating question to reflect upon, and one which can help you to shine a light on your dreaming self. Think back on your recent dreams and nightmares, or leaf through your dream journal as you consider this question. You are so much more than your waking self! Who is your dreaming self? The following practice helps you to get clarity on who “dream you” is.
who are you when you dream?
As you reflect on the kinds of dreams and nightmares you generally have, consider the following questions:
1. Who is your dreaming self? How do you act, react, and reflect in the dream state? Do you feel you are an empowered dreamer—do you act to protect yourself and others in dreams, and are you able to state your needs, boundaries, and feelings? Or do you feel vulnerable and unsafe in your dreams, perhaps often being chased or attacked, or hiding from enemies? Do bad things happen to you, like falling off cliffs or being trapped in burning buildings? Perhaps your dreaming self is sometimes your child self, or perhaps you shapeshift into animals, birds, aliens, or objects in your dreams—in which case, how would you describe the energy of these dreams? Jot down your observations about your dreaming self in your nightmare journal as if you’re making a character study. List the traits and personality type of your dreaming self.
2. How do you think in your dreams? Consider your thought process in the dream state. Perhaps you are highly aware in your dreams and have meaningful encounters and conversations, or perhaps you feel you are flung willy-nilly into crazy situations with low awareness of what’s going on. Are you able to think fairly logically? Without judgment, consider the way you reflect in dreams, including the thoughts you hide from other dream figures. Pay attention to times when your dreaming train of thought escalates into anxiety, and notice how this causes the dream scene to change in response.
3. What kinds of situations do you often find yourself in? Identify themes and recurring emotions.
4. How do you react to fear? Whenever you feel fearful in a dream or nightmare, what happens? Does your fear get the better of you and escalate, or can you calm it down? When confronted by danger, do you tend to flee, fight, freeze, wake up screaming, or become lucidly aware within that dream? Write down your habitual response to fearful dreams, and also note your ideal response. For example, instead of running away, you could decide to turn and calmly face what’s chasing you. We’ll look at how to do this in Practice 14: Creative Nightmare Responses.
5. The crucial thing to know is that whoever you may be when you dream, you can change the way you respond and react to your dreams. You can empower your dreaming self. When you engage lucidly with a nightmare while awake (through dreamwork after the nightmare) or while asleep (during a lucid dream), you can change your nightmare response in simple, practical ways. In doing so, you empower your dreaming self and supply it with the resources, serenity, and flexibility it needs to face the dreamworld. This empowers both your dreaming self and your waking self, because the two are intrinsically linked.
It’s helpful to return to these questions as you get into the process of empowering your dreaming self and making changes to your nightmares by using the techniques in this book. You’ll find your dreaming self will grow more confident and powerful, more able to respond creatively to situations, and more aware. The Nightmare Quiz in Chapter 5 will help you pinpoint your sleeper/dreamer type even more precisely, but it’s great to already begin to consider the key question of who you are when you dream.
Three Common Questions about Nightmares
The most common question I get about nightmares is this: How do I stop them? My hope is that as you progress through this book, you’ll find that the idea of “stopping” nightmares loses importance as the larger picture is revealed. Instead, it will seem far healthier, more exciting, and more relevant to work constructively with nightmares so that their frequency diminishes naturally due to the integrative work you have done. Nightmares are powerful gifts of the psyche that help us chart our path through life. Still, let’s address this question, along with two others that people ask me all the time.
“How do I stop my nightmares?”
The best way of reducing nightmare frequency and intensity is to work with them in healing and transformative ways to understand their message and release their powerful gifts. Once we have done this, their job is done, so they don’t need to return. Nightmares come with a message, and they often show us the solutions to our life issues. When we suppress them, we don’t solve the problem! We continue to live in fear, and that’s an unfortunate way to live, don’t you think? Sometimes people use sleeping pills or anxiety medication to block out their nightmares. For some, this may work for a short period, but then they report the nightmares returning full force. Nightmares are dreams that shout at us to get us to listen because there is something within us that needs healing. When we befriend our nightmares and work with them in gentle and healing ways, we can spark major psycho-spiritual transformation, freeing up lots of energy with which to create a happier life for ourselves and those around us. It’s a win-win situation!
“Are the evil beings in my dreams real?”
When we bring lucid awareness to our nightmares, either during the dream or afterwards through waking dreamwork, we can discover for ourselves the nature of our dream figures. A common psychological approach is that every element of any dream is a part of ourselves. This means that we are the dream (or the nightmare!) and it is us. When we have forcibly repressed an unwanted shadow side of ourselves, this may surge up in the form of a highly conscious aggressive dream figure. Through working with the nightmare, we can discover why this figure has chosen this moment to present itself to us.
Remember what we said earlier about the dream being a thought-responsive environment? Well, it also reflects our beliefs, so it can be helpful to examine and question your beliefs about supernatural powers, the existence of “evil,” and the reality (or non-reality) of devils, goblins, sorcerers, or malign presences. Much depends on your beliefs, expectations, and fear levels within the nightmare. When we experiment with calming our fears in frightening nightmares, what we very often find is that the dream responds by growing calm, and the nasty entities vanish into black dust or transform into benign, friendly dream figures. When we conquer fear, we may find that the “evil beings” no longer appear in our nightmares, and that tells us a lot about their illusory nature.
Dream figures (this includes animals and non-human figures, as well as magical objects) do appear to have differing levels of awareness. I describe these in my book Llewellyn’s Complete Book of Lucid Dreaming as ranging from zombies and puppets to conscious equals and super-aware dream figures. While dream figures are usually symbolic, sometimes we may feel we are tapping into darker collective energies. If a super-aware dream figure, beast, or animal shows up in your nightmare as an aggressive presence, you can take various actions to protect yourself and respond creatively. See Practice 14: Creative Nightmare Responses and Practice 22: Create a Sacred Altar.
“Could I die in a nightmare or during sleep paralysis?”
Nightmares and sleep paralysis experiences take place in normal stages of sleep that we all move through each night. I have had thousands of sleep paralysis experiences and I’m still alive to tell the tale—why wouldn’t I be? The truth is, anyone could die at any stage of waking or sleep. But if it was so easy to die during these experiences, we would find people dead in their beds all the time! The human body has a super-strong connection to life, and even when we feel extreme terror, unless we have a heart condition, our terror will not even come close to threatening our life. Why not be brave and—armed with suitable protections—walk towards our fears? It’s not worth being dominated by them.
Ask yourself, “What is the worst thing that could happen to me in this state of consciousness?” And crucially, “What do I need to feel safe in this state?” (A superhero ally, a magic power …) Ask yourself how you feel about the natural transition we call death. Are you frightened of dying? What is that fear based on? Examine your beliefs and you may find it’s easier to let go of fear than you imagine. Practice 39: Question Your Beliefs, Assumptions, and Expectations may help with this.
Lucid Dreaming and Its Connection to Nightmares
Other questions I often receive focus on lucid dreaming. Lucid dreams are dreams where we know that we are dreaming while we are dreaming. This awareness enables us to guide and shape the dream if we wish to, but lucidity is not synonymous with control: it’s absolutely possible to go with the flow of the dream while lucid without actively trying to change events. Lucid dreaming can be a mind-blowingly fabulous experience, as you can fly to the stars, explore the fabric of consciousness, make love to sexy dream people, connect with deceased loved ones, and work directly within the dream for healing, creativity, and personal transformation.
Yet it’s amazing how many people tell me they are scared of having lucid dreams. The common factor among these people tends to be that they suffer from frightening lucid nocturnal experiences, such as sleep paralysis or lucid nightmares. It’s ironic, really, because there are millions of people out there who long to get lucid in their dreams and who would give a lot to have the kind of natural, spontaneous lucid sleep experiences that the others have. In fact, people often write to me asking how to trigger sleep paralysis, as they’ve heard it’s a great route into lucid dreaming!
Many people successfully tackle their nightmares by becoming lucid and working directly with nightmare imagery in healing, creative, transformative ways. In my book The Art of Lucid Dreaming, you’ll find many Lucidity Programmes and original techniques dedicated to helping you learn to have lucid dreams and increase their stability and frequency. In this book, I focus on the scary side of lucid experiences. We’ll look at how to remain calm when frightening imagery seems to take on an ominous life of its own and we feel as if we’ve landed with full awareness inside a crazed horror movie. We’ll also explore the wonderful ways in which lucidity can help us transform all manner of unpleasant sleep experiences.
But we don’t need to be a lucid dreamer to heal nightmares! We can work in the same way when we reenter a dream imaginatively while awake, and this book gives you many techniques for doing this. However, if you’re interested in having lucid dreams, the following practice gives you my top ten tips for waking up inside a dream.
top ten tips for getting lucid
in your dreams and nightmares
1. Treat yourself to afternoon naps. In terms of brain chemistry, a nap is an optimal moment for lucid dreaming: the body is tired but the brain is alert, and we are usually quick to enter dream-rich REM sleep, a state in which dreams are vivid and surreal—all the better for realising that we are dreaming.
2. Do creative visualisations. These can be thought of as beautiful, positive messages for your unconscious to absorb and react to. When we create a vivid “waking dream” in our mind’s eye, we speak directly to our unconscious in its own language of symbolism and powerful imagery. Visualise yourself realising “this is a dream!” and going on to enjoy wonderful lucid experiences within the dream space. This primes your mind to get lucid.
3. Practise meditation. Meditate for just a few minutes before you sleep, and gradually build up to longer sessions. Try a simple meditation such as the one in Practice 6: Pre-Bed Meditation to Calm the Mind. Meditation is a wonderful mindfulness technique that brings us into the moment, stabilises the mind, and leads us to our calm, still centre. All of these things are great for training the brain towards stable lucid awareness.
4. Label your states of consciousness. Sleeping and waking are by no means the only states we experience, yet many people take this either-or approach to conscious experience. “You’re either awake or asleep, right?” they say. Well, actually it’s really not that simple. In fact, there are many states of consciousness, and a lot of overlap and twilight zones between them. To train your lucidity skills, practise labelling your state of consciousness whenever you can: daydreaming, wide awake, tired and struggling to remain mentally alert, deep relaxation, etc. Try labelling your sleep states as you enter them, such as the hypnogogic state (when pre-sleep imagery pops up as you’re nodding off) or stage-one sleep (which is easy to identify, as this is when you’re resting and your head lolls—always embarrassing when it happens in a business meeting!). Get used to doing this (labelling your state of consciousness, not falling asleep at work), and you’ll find it easier to identify when you are dreaming, and become lucid.
5. Keep a dream journal. This opens the lines of communication between you and your dreaming mind. The better you recognise your individual dream images and recurring themes, the easier it will become to notice when they next appear in a dream, prompting you to realise, “This is a dream!” Follow the tips in Practice 2: Keep a Nightmare Journal.
6. Observe pre-sleep imagery. A fabulous practice to help you become lucid in a dream is to observe your weird and wonderful pre-sleep imagery and sensations. Known as hypnagogia, this state arises during the transition between waking and sleeping (and also when we emerge from sleep, when it’s called hypnopompia). Relax in bed and instead of releasing your awareness, simply wait for points of light, imagery, and moving pictures to appear in your mind’s eye. This is the beginning of dreaming, and if you can stay aware and not get sucked into the imagery, you can sail straight into a fully lucid dream from this state!
7. Tune into your body. The body is one of the best lucidity triggers. Our dream body feels different from our physical body. It is light, flexible, stretchy, floaty, and it can fly. These are important clues that we are dreaming! Tune into your physical body while awake and really notice how it feels to exist in this body. You may have aches and pains or itches; your hair tickles your face; your body is solid; you have the same number of fingers from one moment to the next; it hurts if you bump into something; your limbs remain the same length all day long; and you have a weight and solidity to you. Feel the breath travel coolly in and out of your lungs, and remind yourself to recognise the difference the next time you find yourself in a dream body.
8. Do reality checks. Whenever you see something strange, beautiful, or ugly, or whenever you carry out a habitual action such as walking through a door, ask yourself if you are dreaming now. Expect to find that you are dreaming. After all, how do you know you aren’t? Carry out a reality check, such as trying to put a finger through the palm of your other hand, or pinching your nose to see if you can still breathe through it. (Hint: if you can, you’re dreaming!) The more you carry out reality checks while awake, the more likely you are to remember to check your reality in a dream … and discover that you are in fact dreaming.
9. Wake early, then read, sleep, and get lucid. There’s a technique known as “Wake Back to Bed (WBTB)” where you wake yourself up around 4–5 hours into your night of sleep (that’s the hard bit), then get up for about 15–30 minutes, write down your dreams, read a bit of a lucid dreaming book, or meditate. If you are a deep sleeper who usually falls asleep within seconds, you could try watching a YouTube video on lucidity (screen light can prevent some people from falling back to sleep, so only do this if it’s easy for you to get back to sleep afterwards). Then you return to bed and visualise yourself becoming lucid in one of your dreams. As with afternoon naps, this is a great time to get lucid in terms of brain chemistry, and you can glide calmly into sleep while repeating a lucidity mantra such as this one: “Everything I see and touch is a dream.” Suddenly, that mantra will come true and you’ll be lucid in your dream. It’s best to use techniques that disrupt your sleep sparingly, and not on consecutive nights. Sleep is precious; it revitalises and heals us, giving us vital energy with which to face life, so skimping on it is not advisable.
10. Incubate a lucid dream. When we incubate a dream, we simply ask for one. It’s helpful to ritualise this to solidify our intention and get the message through to our dreaming mind. You could write a letter to your dreaming mind, asking it to help you get lucid, and put it under your pillow, or you could sleep with a “lucidity pebble” in your hand and try to hold onto it all night—this is possible and has triggered lucidity in people on my retreats, so even if it sounds like a funny thing to do, give it a try! The pebble symbolises your lucid intent, and you may even find yourself holding it in a dream and then understanding that you are dreaming now. You can also shout out to your dreaming mind as you fall asleep, “Help me, please, to get lucid in my dreams!” This one often works for me. Feel gratitude (this is a powerful force) and fully expect that your awareness will increase enough in your dream for you to understand that you are dreaming.
The Sacred Elixir of Sleep
So often in these hectic days, sleep is viewed as an inconvenience—ah, if only we didn’t have to sleep, we could just keep working and working like maniacs every single hour of the day! Wouldn’t that be brilliant? Well, no. The fact is, without sleep, we would all become gibbering wrecks within a short amount of time. A lack of sleep kills our mental agility, crushes our creativity, stomps on our short-term memory, and brutalises our basic responses to the people around us. When we are sleep-deprived, we become short-tempered, unable to think clearly, and prone to depression and worry. This less-than-optimal mental state may well infiltrate our dreams, turning them into unpleasant nightmares.
Even if you are a severe nightmare sufferer and fear falling asleep, remember that there is more to sleep than dreaming! We enter deep, recuperative spaces during our night of sleep that help us heal. Hormones that stimulate cellular repair are released during sleep, immune system replenishing takes place, and an immune factor that is a potent killer of cancer cells increases tenfold. Unconsciously regulated bodily functions such as our circulation and endocrine systems are overseen by the autonomic nervous system, which has an intimate relationship with sleep.2 We need our sleep to heal us. If you delay bedtime because you’re scared of having nightmares, you wind up turning into a sleep-deprived insomniac. Now you have not just one problem but two! These turn into the even more impactful problem of feeling unable to cope with life because you’re constantly exhausted.
The good news is there are easy steps we can take to have a happier dream life and healthy sleep. This book looks thoroughly at ways of working beneficially with nightmares so that you no longer feel plagued by them, and in the meantime, it’s a good idea to change your perspective of sleep to embrace its deeply nurturing and healing function. Let’s see what happens when we give the health-bestowing state of sleep a little of the reverence it deserves through the simple power of ritual.
create a soothing bedtime ritual
When we dread sleep due to nightmares or resent it because we have other, more important things to do, we cut ourselves off from a vital source of healing and distance ourselves from the amazing journey that sleeping and dreaming can become. We spend a third of our lives asleep. This is such a huge chunk of time, so why not make the most of it? When we welcome sleep, we open the gates to a vital and sacred state of being.
• From this day on, make the healthy decision to view your night of sleep as a glorious mini-vacation. You may prefer to focus on the physiological benefits of sleep or how vibrant and alive you feel when you’ve had a good sleep. You might think of sleep as overnight soul therapy at a place of deep healing, or as a spiritual refuge or a visit to a world of great beauty and mystery. Word it however you want, but try and fix in your mind a firm and very positive vision of this “other world” you’ll visit when you lie down to sleep.
• Sleeping is sacred. How do we prepare to enter this sacred, healing state? Do we overeat, smoke, or get a bit drunk, then flop into bed and start snoring immediately? It’s fine to do this now and then! We don’t have to become sleep zealots. But on the nights when we’re not party animals, let’s make a real effort to greet and welcome sleep. Start by preparing your bedroom for this nightly treat. Turn your bedroom into a peaceful, inviting space, with warm, dim lighting. Is your mattress comfy? And your pillow? If street noise keeps you awake, use ear plugs. If a street light shines into your room all night, consider installing blackout blinds. Keep your bedroom cool; studies show we sleep better with a cool head, and this can help with insomnia.3
• Create a ritual to encourage a night of blissful sleep. This might include any of the following: take a bath with candles and bubbles, listen to relaxing meditative music, or put a few drops of essential oil on your pillow (sleep-promoting ones are lavender and chamomile, and another favourite of mine for its warmth and comfort is sweet orange). Throughout this ritual, be aware that you are nurturing yourself, which is a very good thing to do. You deserve a restful night and a peaceful mind. Once in bed, meditate for a short while. (The next practice shares a simple pre-sleep meditation.)
• Keep an eye on the effects that your pre-sleep ritual has on your sleep and on your life. Try it for a few weeks at first, adjust it as you go along, and see how it makes you feel. Does it improve your sleep? Do you feel brighter when you wake up in the morning? How are your dreams? Write down any dreams you recall, as well as the way you feel when you wake up. Gradually you are building up a clear picture of yourself as a sleeper and dreamer, and this is an excellent first step towards a healthier, happier life.
The final practice in this chapter is designed to help you enter the right state of mind before you cross the threshold into sleep.
pre-bed meditation to calm the mind
Our state of mind as we enter sleep has a great influence on the kinds of dreams we have. When we take time to really calm down, release the stresses of the day, and welcome sleep as the healing refuge that it is, we have a far better chance of experiencing a peaceful night.
• Sit in bed in dim light or darkness and take deep, calming breaths.
• With every inhalation, bring peace and light into your body. Let this flow around, reaching every part of you, from your inner organs to the skin on your face.
• With every exhalation, consciously release the thoughts and worries from the day you just had.
• When you feel you have cleared your thoughts and worries, begin a simple mantra, such as breathing in while thinking, “I am … ,” and breathing out while thinking, “… peaceful.”
• As you settle into this gentle breathing rhythm, there will be moments when you feel as if you are floating in peaceful space. Relax and let these precious moments expand; they are golden moments of pure awareness and are to be treasured and prolonged whenever they occur.
• When thoughts arise, just notice them without worrying or judging yourself for “not meditating properly.” Thoughts are natural. Don’t engage with them; instead, use them as a reminder to continue with your breathing and mantra. Be ready for another golden floaty moment.
• Embrace the beautiful rhythm of mantra … golden moment … thoughts, mantra … golden moment … thoughts …
• When you feel completely serene, lie slowly back in bed and smile, knowing you will have a wonderfully restful night’s sleep.
In this chapter, we have explored what nightmares are, why we have them, and how dreams turn into nightmares. We’ve looked at what happens when we ignore nightmares and how to release excess fear. We’ve seen the four major steps in healing, transformative nightmare work (remember dreams, uncover their meaning, release emotions, take positive action). Keeping a nightmare journal is an excellent first step towards the art of transforming nightmares, and a relaxing pre-bed meditation sets us on the right path to a peaceful night’s sleep. We’ve discussed lucid dreams and how to trigger them, and clarified that we don’t need to be a lucid dreamer to heal nightmares since we can reenter a dream imaginatively while awake. When we walk bravely to meet our nightmares, we open ourselves up to receive their wisdom and their powerful healing and creativity.
In the next chapter, we’ll explore the tantalising and often obscure symbolic language of nightmares, and how to decipher our wildest dreams.