Healing from Recurring and Traumatic NigHtmares
Nightmares can be prickly bedfellows. It can feel deeply unfair when they keep bothering us! There we are, valiantly trying to get through life ignoring our wounds and sadness, and what happens? Our nightmares rear up while we sleep and bellow at us again and again until we receive their message, which is generally along the lines of, “Healing is needed!” or “Change is needed!” or “This is how you really feel!” With wicked visual detail, charged emotions, and astonishingly apt metaphors, our nightmares create this wild theatre to show us how much they care. On a mission to help us become whole, they shine a spotlight to show us where healing or transformation is needed.
However, despite their good intentions, nightmares can wreak havoc on our lives. Nothing destroys a peaceful night of sleep as effectively as a bone-chilling nightmare. In the case of recurring nightmares, it can feel as though we are being repeatedly kicked in the teeth or being punished for something we don’t understand. People write to me saying, “Each time I go to sleep, I feel myself falling into my recurring nightmare, so I force myself awake. This happens again and again. I am exhausted.” Or they write, “How can I stop this nightmare that’s been haunting me for twenty years?” or “I am too frightened to go to sleep, so my sleep quality is terrible and I wake up depressed and anxious.” At this level of interference, nightmares are not doing us any good because we have reached such a state of fear and exhaustion that our health, mental state, relationships, and job may be severely compromised. We are more likely to develop chronic health issues when our sleep quality is eroded, and become emotionally unstable, as well as more vulnerable to anxiety and depression.
Sleep is a wonder. It is an elixir of health. While we sleep and dream, our bodies carry out a wealth of restorative activities, including cellular regeneration and the regulation of blood pressure, the endocrine and circulatory systems, and more. Memory consolidation takes place during sleep, and sleeping well increases our social intelligence and emotional empathy.22 The immune system is strengthened during sleep. Dreaming takes place during sleep, and when we dream, we process experiences, incorporate new skills, create solutions to problems, release strong emotions, and bring healing to the psyche. Healing is one of the main functions of sleep. Studies indicate that getting adequate sleep could help us reduce depression 23 and suicidal tendencies.24
Anything that regularly prevents us from getting a good night’s sleep is a threat to our health and wellbeing. Yes, there will occasionally be times in life when we have to get through a period of inadequate sleep, such as that magical and exhausting time when we welcome a newborn baby into our lives, but factors such as stress and worry can cause long-term insomnia by stopping us from falling asleep and waking us up in the night. So can recurring nightmares. If nightmares regularly disturb our sleep, they need to be worked with for resolution and healing so that they no longer “need” to visit us to flag up our festering wounds and unresolved issues. I cannot over-state the importance of a good night’s sleep for health, vitality, and living an empowered life. Practice 5: Create a Soothing Bedtime Ritual gives tips on how to welcome the healing power of sleep into your life. Now we’ll explore how to work directly with recurring nightmares for healing transformation so that we become empowered and more joyful both in the dreamworld and in waking life.
What Are Recurring Nightmares
and Why Do We Have Them?
A recurring nightmare is a distressing dream that returns again and again. Some recurring nightmares return only during times of stress, or they happen in a short burst around a triggering event but then stop of their own accord. Other nightmares return again and again over an entire lifetime! Sometimes a nightmare repeats in exact detail, like watching the same movie a second time (and a third, and a fourth …), but often there are slight deviations within the dream story: “I had the ‘monster in the attic’ dream again last night, only this time the monster wasn’t hiding behind the curtain; it jumped out of the closet!” There are also recurring nightmare themes, such as “hiding from danger,” “falling to certain death,” “intruder in my home,” and so on.
A recurring nightmare indicates that we have an unresolved issue, an ongoing challenging situation, or a moment in our past when we didn’t have the inner resources we needed to get us through it without fear, shame, stress, embarrassment, or pain. In the case of recurring nightmares rooted in traumatic past events, part of us remains “stuck” at a particular moment in our life and our nightmares revisit that moment to flag it up, so that we can actively find resolution and move into a happier, more peaceful way of living. Recurring nightmares can range from the well-known “stress” ones, such as missing a train or sitting an exam and realising we know none of the answers, to nightmares rooted in specific personal trauma, such as the war veteran who repeatedly dreams of being wounded or killed in combat.
When we look closely at how the brain works, we see that recurring nightmares are also learned behaviours.25 Like a broken record, the brain slips into a groove it recognises, and the nightmare story or theme replays multiple times, sometimes for years on end. The good news is we can change learned behaviours. We can change the nightmare story so that the brain slips into a different groove. In this chapter, we’ll look at the power of changing the nightmare story, and I’ll share different practices for working with any recurring nightmare, as well as dedicated practices for people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Let’s look at an example of a recurring nightmare to see how the dreaming mind translates feelings of deep unease and dread into visual imagery. In this nightmare, the storyline is attached to a well-known horror story by Stephen King. One lady who responded to my call for nightmares for this book, Kris, shared this recurring nightmare with me. It occurred at a time when her husband had been diagnosed with a mental illness.
I am so utterly horrified by the realization that we have purchased a home that has the history of the murdered twin girls from the movie The Shining. I know we need to list this house for sale as soon as possible, but I don’t believe it will sell because it will be discovered that there has been this awful murder in the home and no one will want to purchase it. We’ll just be stuck living here!
In my mind’s eye, I can see where there would have been blood splatter on the walls. Now it is cleaned up, but the psychic imprint of the blood and the murder remains. I feel horrified to think of these twin girls being axe-murdered by their crazy father. I must keep this a secret from my guests, so as not to terrify them. I wonder if I can just stay away from this part of the house? It feels there is so much evil in that room, and like I will never be able to escape living here.
Kris comments:
I had this dream in so many different ways and formats. It’s always pretty much the same in that there is a room that just absolutely terrifies me where these girls have been murdered. Sometimes the twins themselves morph into something evil! Sometimes they appear as skeletons, very scary ones, with creepy grins, and in one version of the nightmare, one was wielding a butcher’s knife. She was stabbing at her twin’s pelvis bone. Both had the biggest, most evil skeletal grins! Interestingly enough, after my husband and I got divorced, the dream became less and less and I finally quit dreaming it all together. The reason we got divorced was he became very ill with mental illness. He chose not to medicate. I find it interesting that the main character who was the axe murderer in the movie also lost his mind and was mentally ill. Was this the reason I was having this dream?
The dreaming mind is incredibly gifted at finding parallels for our personal situation in movies, mythology, art, fiction, historical and current events, and the situations of friends, family, or the famous. A recurring nightmare may fixate on a particular story to tell us that we are in fact living a similar story. This can be baffling at first (“Why do I keep dreaming about Stalin/the Minotaur/my friends Sue and Bob?”), which is why it’s helpful to unwrap the nightmare to discover our associations with it and its symbolic meaning, as shown in the practices in Chapter 2. Keeping a nightmare journal is also essential, because it helps us to identify recurring themes and pinpoint when a particular nightmare recurs, so that we can begin to connect the dots: “Aha! I get the haunted house nightmare whenever my mother-in-law visits!”
Nightmares are working for us, not against us. They create their gruesome creative theatre so that we can engage with our wounds for empowerment and greater happiness. When we work with a recurring nightmare, we will usually be able to identify not only the issue it refers to but also how we can take action in our lives to begin the healing process. In Kris’s case, the dream was highlighting that there was something horrifying happening within her home life, and emphasised her awful feeling that “I will never be able to escape living here.” In the end, by divorcing her husband, she took steps to “escape,” and the nightmares ceased after that.
Sometimes nightmares do more than flag up something that we need to face: they reflect our process of empowerment as we move through a difficult situation, as seen in the following example.
Nasty Companions:
Nightmares That Personify Shame and Abuse
Nightmares change to reflect our inner changes, and when we keep a dream journal, it’s easy to track recurring themes and observe ourselves reflected in a symbolic mirror. Sometimes we encounter dream figures who personify feelings of worthlessness or shame that we have internalised at a young age. Such nightmares may feel abusive themselves, but it’s valuable to remember that all nightmares come to help and heal us, and the reason such nightmares occur is to flag up the fact that we have not yet liberated ourselves from this internalised shame. This is a call to action from our soul, and our opportunity to do some healing work.
Another woman who generously shared her nightmares with me and described how they fit with her brave life story is Delia, who hopes her experiences will help others. She had just left her ex and was in the process of disengaging from his cycles of abusive behaviour when she had a series of nightmares whose recurring theme was that of being pursued by killers. In her brave and resourceful reaction to the nasty man in the following nightmare, we see a shift from fear to empowerment. Though at the beginning the dreamer only pretends to appear strong, she actually becomes strong and speaks a powerful truth. Subsequent dreams continued this trend. Delia remarks, “More dreams around this period involve me successfully and adeptly outsmarting and evading these relentless killers or acting defiantly in response to malicious verbal attacks.”
Sitting with my ex at a café. A few tables away sits a hideously ugly, badly dressed, terribly out-of-shape man with a nasty and hateful attitude. He hurls insults and expletives at us. This man is mentally unstable and quite dangerous. He comes over and sits at our table; now my ex is gone and it’s just him and me. Now that he’s so close up, I can clearly see how revoltingly ugly and unkempt he is.
With this closer view, disgust and repulsion begin to equal my fear of him. He continues talking in the most unnerving manner about having the power to kill, and I become even more afraid. Nonetheless, I offer responses in an effort to appear strong and unshaken, acting defiant and making it all up as I go along. Although I start out pretending, as I continue this act, I begin to actually find reason and truth in my words—I’m quite surprised at myself! One thing I say to him is, “Having the power to kill and choosing not to is far more powerful.”
Delia felt that these nightmares in which she acted with power helped her to release long-held trauma stemming from childhood abuse. In particular, she was empowered to release the overwhelming sense of being unsafe and doomed that had been showing up for years in various guises in her nightmares as a relentless attacker who would inevitably track her down. She explains:
As I increasingly rejected the abuse, along with the long-standing internalised shame and sense of worthlessness, my dreams increasingly depicted these attackers as ugly and pitiful, inciting repulsion to snap me out of unwitting acceptance. Attackers in the dreams of this era usually heaped verbal abuse on me, as if I were facing a personified manifestation of internalised shame. Having the chance to see such an intangible aspect, one that thrives by lurking in the shadows, I saw it for what it was: this nasty companion that had been trailing me all along.
Dreams and nightmares act like emotional, psychological, and spiritual barometers, providing us with a reading of how we’re coping and where we are in life. The nasty companions created by Delia’s dreaming mind enabled her to see clearly what she needed to release in order to move into a more joyful life, and they enabled her to practise standing up for herself and refusing to accept abuse. Delia comments:
The more I tried to rebuild my life, the more encouraging and reflective my dreams were of this. The more of these dreams I had, the more empowered and guided I felt to continue.
When we know how to use dreamwork tools, we can receive gifts of insight, healing, and action steps from our nightmares at a far earlier stage in the proceedings. Dreamwork can support us through the worst of life events and bring us healing gifts. Many years of teaching transformative dream workshops has taught me that when we work with nightmares in a self-induced waking trance, we open the gateway to our unconscious and can work with it to co-create something new. This might be a new perspective on our relationships, a new creative concept, or a new stream of healing imagery. Let’s look at how three of my core Lucid Dreamplay techniques can help resolve recurring nightmares.
Resolve Recurring Bad Dreams with
the Lucid Imaging Nightmare Solution (LINS)
Dreamwork can help us speed up the process of resolution and empowerment, because when we work actively with a nightmare, we enable profound transformation. A joyful woman I know, Cornelia from Austria, recounts how she resolved a recurring nightmare in one of my workshops. This is her nightmare:
I had recurring nightmares about an extremely aggressive infant. It used to jump out of a lying position right into my face, like a kamikaze warrior, while I just stood there with staring eyes, not able to move.
Here is Cornelia’s report of how she changed the nightmare story through the Lucid Imaging Nightmare Solution. The basic steps are feeling safe and secure, reentering the nightmare at or just before the tipping point when things get unpleasant, then interacting consciously and intuitively with the nightmare with an intent to heal or learn something.
I visualise the zombie baby lying in a dark room on a glass table. It jumps towards me, but this time I’m ready to catch it like a fireball. “Let’s switch roles,” I say, and feel the baby’s energy streaming into my body. This energy shift is accompanied by flashes and the arising of a green vortex spinning faster and faster around us. After the energy transfer, I feel strong and ready to fight, not against but for the baby. I’m in the role of a protective mother now, and at the same time I’m the baby, not aggressive anymore but peaceful and secure in the arms of a parent. We are a unity, a rearranged inner team. The dream scenery has changed as well: The room is lighter now due to several glass doors in front of us. I know exactly which door I want to open.
Notice how the entire dreamscape lightened in response to this integrative dreamwork. When we reenter our dreams with lucid awareness, we change the energy of the dream! We reclaim this powerful energy that we have somehow become separated from along the way, and when we empower ourselves in this way, we feel stronger, more resourceful, and joyful. Cornelia’s face was luminous with delight as she shared her nightmare transformation with the group. She was shining like a star.
When we let our fear rule our dreams and rule our life, we become like cardboard cutouts, not daring to live fully, just going through the motions of being alive. It can be painful and difficult at first to embrace self-knowledge, but when we are brave and turn to look at the deepest part of ourselves through our dreams and nightmares, we become truly alive. We are able to tap into our own spiritual power and our deep healing potential. We find ourselves embracing life with joy!
Changing the Nightmare Story Through Lucid Writing
In a Transformative Lucidity workshop, Cornelia worked on another recurring nightmare with my Lucid Writing Technique for Nightmares (practice 24). If you’re not someone who likes writing, exactly the same technique can be done in other ways, including drawing the nightmare or speaking your inner process into a recording device. Here is Cornelia’s second nightmare:
I dream repeatedly of a mountain. I want to climb up it, although it’s far too late for a one-day hike. In all of these mountain dreams, I set off, but I never reach the top of the ominous mountain, which is very frustrating.
Here’s Cornelia’s report of how she changed the nightmare story through Lucid Writing:
With my new, determined energy I gained from the first exercise of Clare’s workshop, I write lucidly:
It’s five and there is this mountain, teasing me. I start climbing and suddenly a chairlift appears, glittering golden like the sun. The lift takes me upwards. The whole mountain is crossed by glittering threads. How could I have missed seeing this network before? I reach the mountaintop. What a peaceful and lovely place! And it only took me half an hour to get here. I notice a temple in the shade of a small garden where a few people are celebrating a party. It’s getting dark and suddenly golden snow is falling onto us.
Cornelia explains:
This dream image reminds me of a lucid dream I had some months before in which I asked for healing and found myself in a night garden in the middle of a golden snow flurry. Being connected again to my healing dream through the Lucid Writing exercise was a wonderful experience. The golden chairlift was an important reminder that there are options for the mountains in life. It’s not about starting from zero, but being aware of the resources we expand over time.
In her Lucid Writing, Cornelia spontaneously connected to a beautiful and soulful past dream. This often happens, or, alternatively, fresh healing imagery is generated. When we manage to shift from a recurring nightmare to positive imagery through dreamwork, this gives us a fantastic opportunity to go one step further and deepen the healing process by bringing this beneficial imagery into our bodies. Next, I share my practice for bringing soul dreams and healing images into the body.
bring soul dreams and
healing imagery into the body
Please note that it’s important to try this practice only with imagery that you find beautiful, positive, healing, and healthy. This is because when we consciously bring images into the body, their power and intention enters us, thrums through our blood, affects our mood, and speaks directly to our conscious and unconscious, becoming part of us in a very visceral way. Experienced dreamworkers may choose to bring nightmarish imagery into the body in order to work on clearing it, but if you’re working alone without a therapist, I’d strongly advise you to stay with happy, healing images unless you really know what you’re doing, as these can only be beneficial to your body, mind, and soul. This practice is geared towards the embodiment of vibrant, uplifting dream imagery and soul dreams.
A soul dream is a luminous dream that seems significant on a spiritual level and may feel profoundly beautiful, wise, or aware. Soul dreams often feature light in all of its forms, including glowing colours, people and animals in vibrant health, or powerful emotions such as joy and a sense of belonging. There may be incredible music in soul dreams, a sense of divine presence, or archetypal and symbolic imagery that speaks to us with great impact.
Soul dreams are not restricted to the dreams we have at night! They can appear in any state of consciousness, from active imagination to deep relaxation, and they can arise as the result of dreamwork. Any marvellous and numinous waking experience can also be used effectively for this practice: if, while walking the dog the other night, you saw a perfect full moon in a starry sky that made your heart leap with hope, you can bring this luminous vision and hopeful feeling into your body. There are no limitations. The same goes for healing imagery, which might range from the thrill of seeing a hawk flying close by while awake to finding a jewel during a nightmare reentry exercise.
1. Choose the soul dream or healing image you’d like to work with. Make sure this image carries highly positive and life-enhancing connotations and emotions for you, and therefore feels like something you would want to embody.
2. You can do this practice to music if you like, but it’s not necessary. A dream of wild horses running may work well with shamanic drumming, while an image of a sparkling lake could gel with a chill-out soundtrack. I usually teach this practice in workshops with no music, and it’s still very effective, so silence is good, too.
3. Stand up in the centre of a room where you have space to move around. If you have mobility issues, just sit or lie comfortably. Even the tiniest body movement, such as wiggling the fingers or shimmying the hips from side to side, can be enough to embody a dream.
4. Close your eyes and relax by breathing deeply a few times. Then summon your healing image or soul dream. Bring it into your mind’s eye with vivid presence and feel its energy fill your whole head with warm light. Imagine this beautiful, alive image beginning to expand.
5. Breathe in, and allow each inward breath to pull your healing image deeper into your body, right down through your neck and into your chest, the heart space. Allow the energy of the image to gather in your heart before moving on down through your belly and sex organs and all the way down your legs to your feet. You may experience places in your body where the energy of the image flows less easily or feels blocked. Just notice this and carry on concentrating on breathing in your image. This stage of the practice can be as long or short as you need.
6. When you feel that your image is fully present in your body, it’s time to start moving in any way that feels right. Walk like a leopard, wave your arms like tree branches, spin and twirl like a butterfly … Do whatever it takes to embody your imagery. Combine your movement with sound: sing, use exclamations of wonder, hum, repeat words from the dream, smile and laugh, create an affirmation that goes with the imagery, or whatever you feel! Imagine yourself becoming the wise dream figure or the mighty stag. Become the glistening water or reexperience the sensation of fusing with golden light. If any ambiguous imagery arises, be present to it and remember that you are free to transform it. If you feel any blocks, resistance, or places in your body where it feels frozen or unyielding, dance and shake that part, or place your hands on it and send love and light.
7. Do your movements and sounds as long as you like, until you feel you have fully embodied your image. You may feel tingling sensations, emotions, and a flow of energy to particular parts of your body. You may feel empowered or liberated. When you are done, smile and thank the image for becoming part of you.
We can work with healing imagery and soul dreams at any moment by simply conjuring the image in our mind’s eye and taking a deep, healing breath to embody it again. It is a super-quick act of empowerment and healing, and nobody else will know we are doing it. We can do this while waiting in line for a coffee or while having a difficult conversation with our child or our boss. It’s a dream mindfulness practice that connects us with the higher part of ourselves, and it helps us to connect with the kind of energy we need more of in our life. The more we connect to soul energy, the more we will notice our lives reflecting this deep, harmonious energy—and our relationships with ourselves and others will change accordingly.
Cornelia reports on how it felt to bring her golden snowflakes from the Lucid Writing exercise into her body:
For the rest of the workshop, as we brought soul dreams into the body, I stayed with this dream image. I visualized myself investigating the glowing snow, letting the snowflakes touch my palms. The snowflakes were whirling vividly around me, covering my shoulders and my head and finally permeating the innermost layers of my being. The workshop exercises interlocked in a perfect way, and I was happy to regain a feeling/image from a former lucid dream. It brought the image back not only into my mind but also into my body. Clare encouraged me to bring the supportive dream image into my mind whenever I’m in a stressful situation. Doing so in my everyday life really helps me to cool down!
When we move from a troubling recurring nightmare to a level of transformative healing that helps us in our daily lives, we have truly mastered the ability to do effective dreamwork.
Traumatic Nightmares and PTSD
We lose vital energy and spiritual power when we are hampered by our past. When traumatic past events colour and define our present state of consciousness, we are bound to have a difficult time navigating life. When we listen to recurring nightmares, we allow our soul to speak to us and show us the wounds that need healing. The philosopher Rumi is often credited as saying, “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” This is true: the psychological, emotional, and spiritual wounds we incur as we go through life offer us enormous potential for growth and enlightenment. We just need to be brave and listen to what our dreams and nightmares tell us about the state of our soul. Then we can use the magical tools of dreamwork and storytelling to move through the portal of the wound into healing and light. If we can free ourselves from our past demons, we recuperate the parts of us that we lost along the way: the parts of us that remain frozen or lost or mired in terror, or the inner child who has been hiding in the wilderness for half a lifetime.
In the case of traumatic recurring nightmares, our dreaming mind is desperately shouting to us that healing or change is needed for us to become whole. It is unhealthy, both psychologically and physically, to ignore and suppress old pain and past traumas. But this doesn’t mean we must relentlessly rake over the past and risk getting bogged down in old feelings of hopelessness or misery. Indeed, when we choose instead to work with the symbolic imagery of nightmares, we can effectuate healing change without directly revisiting painful experiences, as we are dealing with a metaphorical representation of that pain.
It is often easier for people to work with a traumatic dream story than come face-to-face with raw memories of their trauma. When we play around with the storyline and imagery of a nightmare, we feel as if we are at one remove from the characters and events, which makes us feel safer and frees us to engage with the story with greater perspective and empowerment. This enables unconscious changes that might be difficult to make when we remain on the surface and talk about past trauma while fully awake.
Transforming the nightmare story through working with our personal dream imagery is a very powerful process, because we are communicating with the deepest part of our mind in its own language: the symbolic language of dreams. In this section, we’ll take a look at some effective practices for transforming the nightmare story and examples of how this has helped individuals to overcome varying degrees of trauma and alleviate post-traumatic stress disorder.
What Is PTSD?
Post-traumatic stress disorder can arise following experiences of trauma, such as suffering violence or sexual abuse, serving in combat zones, being in a car wreck, experiencing a humanitarian crisis and witnessing others suffer and die, being a slave or otherwise held captive, and other terrifying experiences where the victim is often helpless to change the course of events. The symptoms of PTSD can include flashbacks and intrusive, distressing memories of the event, high levels of anxiety and dread, emotional numbness or hopelessness, and nightmares.
Complex PTSD can arise from prolonged periods of trauma, such as sexual abuse lasting for months or years or ongoing domestic violence. Symptoms can be wide-ranging and may include feelings of hopelessness, suicidal wishes, dissociative symptoms, uncontrollable emotional outbursts, and flashbacks. Nightmares may be only a small part of complex PTSD symptoms. A single traumatic event such as a car crash can also trigger PTSD nightmares where the triggering event is relived or the emotions surrounding it reemerge.
Some PTSD nightmares are exact replicas of the traumatic event in every detail. This happens when a process called dissociation occurs: to protect the psyche, a traumatic memory is stored in a different part of the brain that is not usually used for this purpose, so that it is not accessible in the same way as other memories.26 This suppressed traumatic memory can suddenly surge into consciousness in the form of a terrifying nightmare. Other PTSD nightmares mingle the original triggering event with metaphorical imagery, and still others retain the theme and emotions of the trauma but couch it in a completely different symbolic story.
An encouraging element at play in PTSD nightmares is that of mastery, when the dreamer becomes empowered within the nightmare, moving from the role of victim to someone who reacts by escaping the threat, facing it, acquiring magical powers or allies, or changing the course of action. Having read this far, you’ll immediately understand how waking dreamwork could help with this aspect of nightmare empowerment.
Bob Hoss, director of the the DreamScience Foundation, reports on a Vietnam veteran who logged 130 post-combat nightmares into the University of California at Santa Cruz dreambank.net database over a 45-year period, and notes the pattern of mastery that emerged over time:
During the initial three years following combat, 70% of his dreams appeared as partial replications of traumatic combat memories such as this one: This time, it is not the popping of the tubes, but the whistling of the mortars themselves that alerts us. We run for the bunkers. … There is no roof, only a few pieces of lumber overhead; it is very, very open. The mortars begin to drop … Throughout his 45 years of dream records, post-conflict attempts at “mastering” the threat varied from just a few of the nightmares initially to 60% over time … The mastery can involve magical powers: Attacking soldiers find me. The first one shoots me point blank; his rifle misfires. The second aims and shoots just as the atmosphere begins to freeze. It forms a protective shield in front of me. The bullet punctures the ice, then falls to the floor.27
One trauma therapy with an apparent link to dreaming was discovered in 1987, when clinical psychologist Dr. Francine Shapiro discovered an eye movement technique called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). In this method, the patient is invited to recall a past trauma while engaging in specific left-right eye movements. This helps trauma sufferers process stressful memories and enables the brain to activate self-healing. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, comments that “traumatized people are trapped in frozen associations: Anybody who wears a turban will try to kill me; any man who finds me attractive wants to rape me.” 28 Dreaming sleep plays an important role in mood regulation and the integration of memories and experiences, and our eyes move rapidly to the left and right during REM sleep, so the EMDR method may mimic or stimulate the process of dreaming sleep.29 Psychologist Robert Stickgold remarks, “There is now good evidence that EMDR should be able to take advantage of sleep-dependent processes, which may be blocked or ineffective in PTSD sufferers, to allow effective memory processing and trauma resolution.” 30 EMDR is now one of the treatments for PTSD sanctioned by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Another approach to PTSD nightmares is to engage with them directly while lucid dreaming.
How Lucid Dreaming Can Help with PTSD Nightmares
Visualisations and rewriting the nightmare story while awake can help with nightmares rooted in trauma. Studies show that lucid dreaming can also be effective at reducing recurring nightmares,31 and there are some documented cases where lucid dreaming has kept PTSD nightmares at bay for long periods of time. One Vietnam veteran had suffered for thirty years from a recurring nightmare in which, while fighting the Viet Cong, his friend was killed. Clinical psychiatrist Dr. Timothy Green advised him to pick a place in the nightmare to prompt lucidity and visualise himself becoming lucid and changing the dream. The veteran soon became lucid in his nightmare. Knowing that he was free to create a new outcome, he told his fallen friend that the war was over. His friend sat up and smiled, and together they walked off the battlefield. Over two years later, the nightmare still had not returned.32
The only time in my life that I’ve suffered from recurring trauma-induced nightmares was after finding my four-week-old baby blue-faced and stiff in her cot. She had probably suffocated on some regurgitated milk and was completely unresponsive; she seemed to be dead. Thank goodness, I managed to resuscitate her by breathing into her mouth and pumping her heart. At the hospital, my husband and I were told that after this type of incident, babies were at higher risk of it happening again. That worried me immensely. As a new mother, I was already sleep-deprived, and now whenever my baby was asleep (which was over fourteen hours a day!), I was anxious and kept checking the rise and fall of her belly in case she stopped breathing again.
I began to have traumatic nightmares of finding a baby dead in her cot and arriving too late to bring her back to life. I would scream in anguish and wake up in a panic.
I decided to recognise that I was dreaming the next time the nightmare happened. I became lucid while screaming in that nightmare. With my new, lucid gaze, I saw that the “baby” was in fact a shabby rubber doll that looked nothing like a real baby. It was like discovering that someone had played a really bad-taste joke on me. Suddenly I was furious. I grabbed the doll and shouted full force, “I refuse to have this sort of imagery in my dreams again! I am lucid, and I know my baby is alive!” Then I threw the doll onto the ground. It dissolved into the floorboards, and my anger and anguish dissolved along with it, to be replaced by a deep feeling of peace and radiance. I felt that I was heart to heart with my dreaming mind; I experienced a surge of love, and my whole body buzzed with rainbow yoga energy and light. It felt fantastic. I woke up with my body still buzzing.
The dead baby nightmares never returned. My anxiety levels around my baby dropped, and I felt as if shouting the words “my baby is alive!” in my dream was pure reality creation: as if, with those words, I voiced my intent and manifested her aliveness, her continued existence. Ten years on, Yasmin is a vibrant, energetic child who brings light and laughter into my life every day. Becoming lucid in a trauma-induced nightmare can completely turn it around in astonishing ways and result in profound healing resolution.
Trauma can cause people to shut off from their dreams or experience terrible nightmares. Some people contact me to say they only ever seem to have terrifying dreams, never good ones. This may indicate a case where a root trauma has not yet found resolution and the unconscious is desperate to get the dreamer’s attention so that it can be integrated and healed. However, nightmares are not always a part of PTSD, and dreams can provide a safe space for those healing from trauma. Trauma splits a person open, and it seems that for some, this can result in an open gateway to the world of lucid dreaming.
Bill is a PTSD sufferer and has been an incredibly frequent lucid dreamer since early childhood, so he has been lucid dreaming for over six decades. He told me he’s never had a nightmare, as he is always conscious enough to know that he can change the plot, should it get too bullying, or simply wake himself up. Speaking of his rich and prolific lucid dream life, he remarks:
I was subjected to early and intense childhood trauma, and I’m pretty sure that my dream life has long represented both an escape and a profound way of processing that trauma without reliving it directly. For me, this lucid dreamworld has literally been life-saving. And enriching beyond words. I have this unshakeable feeling trauma has actually been profoundly generative in my ability to lucid dream. PTSD often comes with surprising gifts that are so important to take into account on the road to healing. Given that PTSD so affects the spectrum of consciousness, the capacity for lucid dreaming just might be one of these gifts.
Let’s look at how we can transform a post-traumatic nightmare so that instead of feeling fearful and attacked by it, we learn that we can be strong within the nightmare and engage with it in deeply healing and empowering ways.
how to transform a post-traumatic nightmare
The first step in this practice is incredibly important. You need to be sure that you feel completely supported, safe, and protected by your allies before reentering a traumatic nightmare. In particular, doing nightmare work when you have PTSD carries a risk of retraumatisation if it is not done with adequate care and respect. We are working here for profound healing, resolution, and insight, and preparation is needed to do this successfully. You can do this practice in the company of a trusted friend if you like, or with a therapist trained in dreamwork.
1. Choose allies and protectors until you feel safe about reentering this nightmare. These might include a shield or protective force field, divine light, a real-life friend, a fictional character such as Luke Skywalker, a historical figure like Boudicca the warrior queen, or a power animal, guardian angel, or religious figure. Choose an ally with the ferocity, serenity, or comic genius you feel you need to face this nightmare. Choose a magical object from mythology, fiction, or film, such as Excalibur or a Harry Potter wand. Invest yourself with a magical power such as invisibility or flight. Pick up as many of these allies and protective powers as you want. Move on to the next step only once you feel supported by and in touch with these protective energies.
2. Set a goal. Decide what you want to do once you enter the safe imaginal space of the dream reentry. Will you forgive your attacker? Talk to the shark who bit off your leg? Enter the locked room in the haunted house? Will you and your allies save your dream self from whatever is upsetting them in the nightmare and bring them into a space of light and freedom? Or is your goal to send love and healing energy throughout the very fabric of the nightmare and see what happens when you do this? It’s your call, and there are so many options. See Practice 14: Creative Nightmare Responses for more possibilities for engaging with nightmares.
3. Reenter the dream using a technique such as Practice 8: Reenter the Nightmare. Be sure to feel safe and protected by your allies and magical objects, knowing that you can stop this process at any time by opening your eyes and taking a deep, steadying breath.
4. Once in the nightmare, engage calmly with the imagery, knowing you are completely safe and protected. You are totally free to change your initial plan of what you’d like to do in the nightmare; just go with your intuition. You might want to change the landscape of the nightmare or add light. You may feel inspired to send divine light to nasty or aggressive dream people or animals. You may ask questions and receive answers and wisdom. New symbols and new streams of imagery may arise.
5. You might want to imagine a different, more positive outcome to your nightmare, or this may happen spontaneously, with the imagery evolving naturally as you engage with it with calmness. If you need other help or resources beyond the allies that are already present, bring them in whenever you like, such as a firefighter to carry you from the burning building, or a golden eagle to guide you to a place of safety and nourishment. You are free to rehearse a happier or different ending to your nightmare as many times as you like, changing details if needed until this feels like a very realistic and satisfying dream.
6. You are free to rehearse a happier or different ending to your nightmare as many times as you like, changing details if needed until this feels like a very realistic and satisfying dream.
7. Slowly open your eyes, breathe, and smile. You have been on a healing journey and have taken important steps to transform your traumatic nightmare and move decisively towards health, happiness, and a peaceful night’s sleep!
8. Write down your new dream. Make any additional changes you’d like as you write. The imagination is powerfully intuitive, and this can be an important part of the process.
9. Decide on action to take in your waking life to honour this new dream and empower yourself. For a nightmare where there were puddles of red blood that transformed during the dream reentry into a carpet of yellow daffodils, the action could be wearing yellow or planting some daffodil bulbs. For a nightmare where you stood up to a past abuser with the help of a powerful elephant, you could buy a little figure of an elephant to put on your desk or a cushion cover embroidered with elephants. These small actions will remind you of the power you have to change your story and move forward into the wonderful life you deserve. Of course, the actions can also be much larger: you take the first step to moving house, or begin to hunt in earnest for a different job.
10. Rehearse your new dream before you sleep to embed this new, empowering story into your mind. Really focus on the visual clarity of the imagery and the positive emotions. This is an excellent way to communicate your message of healing to your dreaming mind.
11. Keep a dream journal and notice the changes reflected in your dream life. You may find the nightmares cease altogether, or that they become less frequent, or that their story changes so that healing elements and new imagery are incorporated into the plot. If you find that transformation seems slow, it may take more than one attempt at this nightmare reentry practice to reach the healing you need, and it can be fascinating to see what shifts during subsequent nightmare reentries. Keep a record of these changes and cheer yourself on as you continue along your path to healing.
The Power of Storytelling
We all have an innate story-making ability. We can open up a powerful path to healing when we reenter nightmares and respond spontaneously and intuitively to the imagery in a spirit of communication and curiosity. Practice 13: The Lucid Imaging Nightmare Solution (LINS) shows how this can be done in relaxed states of consciousness or while drifting between wake and sleep. One popular and widespread therapy for working with recurring traumatic nightmares is Imagery Rehearsal Therapy, where the nightmare story is changed, written down, and then reread and focused on every day to absorb it. Rewriting a nightmare to give it a new ending may sound simplistic, but it can be astonishingly effective. When we work directly with our personal unconscious imagery, reform it, and change its direction, it can be like changing the points so that a train is directed onto a different track: the new healing nightmare story replaces the old one.
The imagery in some nightmares is so gruesome or upsetting that it may at first seem impossible to change: “I’m cutting up a baby in a basin and trying to wash it away down the drain. It is more a foetus, really, but even when it’s in bits the eyes stare at me with deadly accusation.” 33 The woman who dreamed this had recently had an abortion. The dream narrative might be rewritten so that instead of cutting up the foetus, the woman holds and heals it, or asks for forgiveness, or watches in fast-forward as the baby grows up and thrives. Only the dreamer can hit on the best way to rewrite their own nightmare. The main thing is that the rewritten version should not be forced; it needs to intuitively feel right to be effective.
This rewriting is like a waking version of lucid dreaming, because you have the freedom to change your dream narrative if you want to. It’s relatively easy to do this on paper, yet once it exists on the page, the changed narrative gains a certain reality and we may experience anything from relief to a profound sense of healing and completion. When we change the nightmare story, we create our own reality. This gives us power.
In the case of the foetus-in-the-basin dream, although on the conscious level the woman claimed to her therapist that she wasn’t affected by having had an abortion, her nightmare suggests that on the unconscious level she saw herself as guilty of murder. Nightmares can flag up divisions in the psyche and signal the need to come to terms with specific events in our lives. As such, they can be useful indicators of the current state of our soul.
Incorporating the new, positive scenario into waking life by replaying it in the mind’s eye can begin the process of improving our state of mind and self-image. Even nightmares without scary imagery—ones where there is simply an overriding feeling of spookiness or danger—can be remoulded by the imagination so that the unpleasant feelings are guided into new ones such as serenity or a sense of safety. When we do dreamwork, we attend to our psychological wellbeing. If we aren’t paying attention to a particular area of our life—our current relationship, our sense of dissatisfaction at work, our longing to travel—then our dreams and nightmares will reflect this lack of balance. When we work with our dreams, we gain insights into how we really feel and can address our needs as we go along.
Bad dreams can be changed spontaneously with strong effect. A participant in one of my Lucid Writing retreat sessions in Portugal was creatively blocked and having a hard time in his personal life. He worked on a recurring nightmare of a storm where he was standing on a clifftop watching helplessly as a fleet of beautiful galleons were swept in by the rough ocean and dashed to pieces on the rocks below him. As I guided the group into an exploration of their chosen dream with their eyes closed, I said, “The image might move and transform into something else, and you can let this happen.” Later, the man told me that when I said this, in his mind’s eye the ships rose from the water and sailed right over his head to safety. He felt that this was a huge breakthrough, both in the psychological impact of the nightmare and in its reflection of a situation in his life in which he felt helpless to act. “Things can change, even such terrible things!” he realised. When I saw him in another workshop six months later, he reported that his circumstances were happier, his creative block had disappeared, and his nightmare had not returned.
Today, neuroscience recognises that “the imagination can form the brain almost to the same degree as actual experience.” 34 The imagination is a flexible tool of great power, and working with it in specific ways can rewire the brain, boosting our self-perception, kindling our creative thinking, and making both our dreaming and waking lives happier. Imagery Rehearsal Therapy is a wonderful nightmare therapy that sleep disorder specialist Dr. Barry Krakow developed with psychiatrist Joseph Neidhardt in the early nineties.35 Dr. Krakow’s studies with chronic nightmare sufferers have shown that rehearsing a different nightmare outcome decreases nightmare frequency.36
imagery rehearsal therapy:
rewrite a nightmare for healing resolution
PTSD sufferers should not attempt this practice without support in the form of a friend or therapist, as working with PTSD nightmares can cause flashbacks. This is a cognitive-behavioural imagery technique where we rewrite our nightmare in any way we wish, then spend time each day absorbing this new, altered imagery. It’s like a waking version of lucid dreaming. It’s also a great exercise for anyone with recurring nightmares, so even if you’re not suffering from PTSD, you can benefit from this.
• If this is your first attempt, choose one of your less scary nightmares—start small and work up to the most terrifying ones.
• Change the nightmare in any way you wish. Think of this as a flexible story that you can change at will. There is no push to try to remove all of the distressing elements. What happens in the story is your choice. Some people choose to make up a new ending, some people want to change the entire nightmare, and others only want to change small details. It’s your call. Changing the story might involve humour or fairytale elements and magic (the evil man changes into a harmless toad), or aggressive actions may be diffused through the transformative power of love and light. The new story might involve dialoguing with scary people or elements of the dream, or removing yourself from danger. Anything is possible—you are the creator of your new dream story! The overall goal is to gain a sense of control over the story.
• When you are happy with your new ending, mentally rehearse your new dream story every day to retrain the mind. Paint a vivid inner picture of the altered version, and link this to the confident feeling that this new version overrides any previous versions.
• Write down your dreams and pay attention to any changes.
• You can use this technique on any other recurring nightmares.
By fictionalising recurring nightmares, we gift ourselves with the ancient power of the storyteller. We might choose to rewrite our fearful dream selves into confident protagonists who can defend themselves and others, heal on all levels, and act with power. Once our new story exists on the page, it gains a certain reality. It can be surprisingly cathartic to do this simple storytelling work and feel the relief of steering our inner lives into a new, healthier direction. And what’s more, we should soon experience positive changes in our dream life.
Changing the Nightmare While Lucid in a Dream
Lucid dreamers can change the story of a recurring nightmare while they are actually experiencing it. This can be deeply and instantly effective, because when we become lucid, we are in direct, conscious contact with the raw material of our nightmare, fully immersed in its three-dimensional, super-realistic imagery and sensations. One little girl who was bitten severely by a dog had recurring nightmares about the attack.37 Her therapist told her about lucid dreaming and that she could change the dream. The next time the nightmare happened, she turned the aggressive dog into a hot dog … and ate it up! The nightmare never came back.
A recurring nightmare is an excellent lucidity trigger. One high school teacher I know has recurring dreams about finding himself in front of an irrepressibly unruly class. But instead of remaining in that difficult situation, these days he realises: “Hang on—I’m not as bad a teacher as this!” He then goes lucid and flies out of the window into happy adventures. For those who suffer from debilitating nightmares and rarely become lucid in their dreams, it may be possible for them to be referred to a sleep lab where dream lucidity can be triggered using transcranial stimulation 38 so that these nightmare sufferers can go ahead and change the story of the dream while lucid. Here’s a practice to link lucidity to a recurring nightmare.
lucid dreaming to
transform a recurring nightmare
Determination is a powerful force. If we feel truly determined to change our dream life for the better, reduce our nightmare frequency and intensity, and experience a restful night’s sleep so that we wake up glowing with life, then we have a high chance of succeeding! This simple practice shows the steps to take.
1. Focus your intention to become lucid the next time you have this recurring nightmare. Feel determined about changing the story of your recurring nightmare.
2. Visualise yourself successfully navigating the nightmare while lucid. Pick the recurring nightmare you want to work with, and mentally reenter it, knowing you are safe and can stop this process at any time. Now imagine that you are in fact lucid in this nightmare! This comes with a feeling of relief and empowerment—you know that you can act with power in total safety to change the story of this dream in any way you wish. Vividly imagine changing the dream so it has the ending of your choice.
3. Set a rock-solid intention to recognise that you are dreaming the next time you have this nightmare. Remind yourself of this frequently, and feel the excitement of knowing that it will happen soon and that you will then be free of your recurring nightmare.
You can also return to Practice 4: Top Ten Tips for Getting Lucid in Your Dreams and Nightmares, and it’s good to read up on this subject if you’re keen to become an adept lucid dreamer. The Art of Lucid Dreaming has a lucidity quiz to fast-track you to the most effective lucid dream induction practices for you personally.
To close this chapter, let’s look at the power of forgiveness and the importance of releasing heavy emotions and past traumas so that we can create a freer life for ourselves.
forgive and release
In life, it’s wise to release our heaviest emotional baggage as we go along, or we’ll end up bogged down with it, hindering our every step. Have you ever dreamed of lugging around huge bags, rushing for a flight or a train, and trying to heave all your stuff with you? Such dreams can turn into nightmares where we have to make a choice: “If I keep dragging this baggage with me, I’ll never make my flight! And my whole family is waiting for me on the plane! Should I just dump my baggage and go?” The answer is yes! Nothing material matters as much as human relationships, and although we’re super attached to our baggage and don’t want to lose it, just imagine the feeling of freedom when we get on that dream flight with our loved ones and soar into new adventures.
Baggage can be made of many things, including imagined slights, past hurts, or big, festering wounds. One of the heaviest bags is guilt. Another is resentment. Yet another is regret. Blame is a pretty hefty one to lug around, too. There are as many bags as we create. We don’t know how cumbersome they’ve become until we release them and feel light again for the first time in years. The key to releasing these old emotions is forgiveness: forgiveness of others and, just as importantly, self-forgiveness. When we work closely with our nightmares, plenty of old emotions can come up. Dreamwork can be an excellent way of releasing them, but it’s always good to throw in a little extra forgiveness, especially if we have been wronged or abused in the past. Here are two practices to ease some of your emotional baggage and regrets and open your heart to love.
• My forgive-love-release technique first appeared in my book Dream Therapy. Here is what you do. Close your eyes, relax, and picture the person you want to forgive. If this person triggers strong negative emotions in you, picture them as a child or baby instead. Say, “I forgive you, X, for causing me pain.” Really mean it. Then say, “I send you love, X,” and visualise warm golden light encompassing them. Then say, “I release my pain.” Breathe out your pain and visualise it leaving your body in a dark mist. Then breathe in light. Do this several times. If at any point you feel resentment rise against the person you want to forgive, begin this practice from the start again. At the end, take a moment to say, “I forgive myself,” and list all the things you forgive yourself for. Finally, say, “I love myself.” Mean it from the bottom of your heart.
• You may have heard of the simple yet powerful Hawaiian forgiveness practice known as Ho’opono’pono. This practice comes from the idea that whatever is happening outside in the physical world also has its roots within individuals—we are all one consciousness, so we can change what’s going on around us by changing ourselves from within. Forgiveness creates harmony within us, and this has a healing effect on the physical world. At the heart of Ho’opono’pono is a mantra to repeat over and over in a heartfelt way: “I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you.”
In this chapter, we have explored recurring nightmares: what they are, why they happen, what we can learn from them, and how to transform them. We’ve considered the importance of feeling safe when doing nightmare work, and how wonderful it is to be supported by allies and magical objects. We’ve investigated the power of storytelling in nightmare transformation, and looked at how to work with nightmares caused by post-traumatic stress disorder. We’ve seen how to use recurring nightmares as effective lucidity triggers, and change the nightmare story from within the dream.
When we illuminate nightmares with calm, conscious attention and feel empowered to work with them, we can liberate ourselves from fear and achieve true transformation. The next chapter looks at the art of transforming fear in what can be a deeply troubling state: that of sleep paralysis.
22. Guadagni et al., “The Effects of Sleep Deprivation on Emotional Empathy.”
23. Hayley et al., “The Relationships Between Insomnia, Sleep Apnoea, and Depression.”
24. Bernert et al., “Association of Poor Subjective Sleep Quality with Risk for Death by Suicide.”
25. Krakow, Turning Nightmares into Dreams.
26. Paul, “How Traumatic Memories Hide in the Brain, and How to Retrieve Them.”
27. Hoss, in Pagel, Parasomnia Dreaming, 152.
28. Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 261.
29. Greenwald, “EMDR: A New Kind of Dreamwork?”
30. Stickgold, “EMDR: A Putative Neurobiological Mechanism of Action.”
31. Zadra and Pihl, “Lucid Dreaming as a Treatment for Recurring Nightmares.”
32. Green, “Lucid Dreaming in the Treatment of Veterans and Others with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”
33. Peters, Living with Dreams, 160.
34. Klein, The Science of Happiness, 54.
35. Neidhardt, “The Beneficial Effects of One Treatment Session and Recording of Nightmares on Chronic Nightmare Sufferers.”
36. Krakow et al., “Imagery Rehearsal Treatment for Chronic Nightmares.”
37. Green, “Lucid Dreaming in the Treatment of Veterans and Others with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.”
38. Voss et al., “Induction of Self Awareness in Dreams through Frontal Low Current Stimulation of Gamma Activity.”