Imagine you are in your bedroom when you hear a creak. You look over, and your window is opening very slowly. Your heart begins to pound and you watch, frozen with horror, as a spiky metal arm enters through the window, followed by another, and yet another … With a shock, you realise that these monstrous limbs are not arms, but the legs of a giant robotic spider! You see the evil glint of its eyes as it scrabbles over the window ledge and moves towards you …
With a jolt, you wake up in darkness with a bursting heart. You fumble for the light and switch it on. Squinting fearfully, you check that there is no robotic spider in your bedroom, no scrabbling metallic limbs. You are safe in your bed.
Safe, but terrified.
It was so real; you can still see those grasping, tentacle-like legs and the deadly intent in the spider’s eyes. Why on earth would you dream something that hideous? To calm yourself down, you have a drink of water and lie back down warily with the light still on, waiting for the feeling of menace to pass.
This is a classic example of a nightmare: a dream that is so frightening or upsetting that it wakes us up. Yet there are many different types of nightmares. For example, have you ever experienced the “dead leg” nightmare, where you try to run but it’s like moving through quicksand, or a sleep paralysis nightmare, where your entire body feels stuck and you may feel suffocated or as if you’re being attacked by nasty creatures? Have you ever had recurring nightmares that seem to strike whenever you’re under pressure, or those heart-breaking dreams where you cry unstoppably? Or nightmares that seem to echo past physical, emotional, or sexual trauma? How about mythical nightmares, where you face fire-breathing dragons or are kept prisoner by unearthly creatures?
Maybe your worst nightmares are apocalyptic, involving tsunamis or devastating earthquakes and nuclear explosions. Or perhaps they are quiet, lonely dreams where you feel yourself to be the only person alive. Do you suffer from unpleasant dreams whenever you’re ill or in pain? You may have had those stressful “missing a train” nightmares, or the ones where you have to sit an exam that you feel completely unprepared for, or a humiliating version of the “naked in public” dreams that people so commonly experience. One way or another, we all have had distressing or disturbing dreams at some point in our lives, even if we quickly forget them, and many of us have full-blown terrifying nightmares.
One sunny afternoon, after a talk I gave on the transformative power of lucidity for nightmare resolution, the university students in the audience were not ready to leave. They swarmed around me for about thirty minutes to get advice on their dreams and nightmares. Two guys suffered from severe sleep paralysis; one girl had trauma-induced nightmares that she wanted to cure; a devout Christian was having “fire and brimstone”–type dreams that he wanted guidance with; several young women approached me to ask about disturbing dreams they had never understood; another was scared to go to sleep because she always fell straight into the same unpleasant dream; and I had to refer one lad to a psychotherapist friend of mine who lived in his area, as his recurring nightmares were so traumatic that he was having panic attacks during the day. And this was just an average sample of students!
In fact, in sleep studies, 85 percent of the adult population reported having at least one nightmare in the past year, and 29 percent reported at least one a month.1 Negative emotions in dreams are associated with depression and sleep disturbances, and large-scale dream surveys reveal that most people regularly report dreams with negative emotional content such as anxiety, fear, or sorrow. Sounds like pretty bad news, doesn’t it? But the little-known secret is that nightmares can be transformative, healing gifts.
All dreams come to help and heal us, and nightmares are dreams that cry out for our attention. They yell: “Healing is needed!” or they call in despair: “Things can’t go on like this any longer!” or they forcibly remind us: “You’re still not over what happened when you were eight years old!” Nightmares flag up areas in our lives where healing change is needed. When we open up to their wisdom, we can learn to harness their creative and healing power. We just need to know how. After that university lecture, I realised it was high time to write an empowering practical book of nightmare solutions that anybody could put to immediate use to release their fears and create a happier dream life.
Fear
Mental healthcare professionals tell me that people ask for medication to stop their nightmares. People want to take a pill to make their nightmares disappear. I understand how bad the fear can get, but my hope is that this book will illuminate the enormous benefits of working with nightmares rather than suppressing them. By doing this tough but amazingly beneficial work, we can heal ourselves and move through life from a place of greater awareness, compassion, and understanding.
Why is it so important to learn how to work with nightmares in empowering ways? Every nightmare researcher I’ve spoken to about this book of practical nightmare solutions and transformative dreamwork has expressed how welcome, empowering, and needed such a book is. Psychologist Dr. Michelle Carr has conducted research at the Dream and Nightmare Laboratory in Montreal and is a researcher at the University of Rochester Sleep and Neurophysiology Laboratory. Michelle and I have both worked on the executive committee of the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD). When I told her about this book, she remarked:
A major problem in sleep medicine right now is the lack of awareness about nightmare treatment. Relatively few sleep clinicians know how to treat nightmares and may turn nightmare sufferers away, telling them to seek other psychological help.
If individuals feel their nightmares are completely beyond their control, they are afraid to go back to sleep, afraid to dream, or even afraid to think about their nightmares. This adds on to the general vulnerability we can feel around sleep, the threshold we cross alone each night. This is why learning to work with and overcome nightmares can be so powerful. It gives a feeling of power back to the nightmare sufferer.
This book provides empowering support for all of the nocturnal horrors and anxieties you or your loved ones have ever faced. But it is not aimed only at nightmare sufferers.
Have you ever experienced fear? Fear of change, fear of a particular situation, fear of making a leap of faith, or fear of looking deep within yourself? Fear can be an enormous obstacle not only for psychological growth but for spiritual development as well. Fear blocks us, freezes us up, and prevents us from living a full and joyous life. Yes, a certain sort of fear can be healthy, such as the fear that stops us from putting our hand in a fire or walking too close to a cliff edge. Fear as a survival instinct makes sense. But the fear we explore in this book is the type that seeps insidiously into all aspects of life, blocking our freedom and creativity, hampering our relationships, and feeding our anxieties. The Art of Transforming Nightmares is aimed at anyone who has ever experienced fear.
In many ways, this book is all about fear.
It’s about how to face our deepest fears and transcend them in very practical ways. Through the dark but magical lens of nightmares and other frightening sleep experiences, we’ll explore how to release crippling fears and anxieties so that we can step forward into a bright and fearless life.
The Art of Transforming Nightmares is not only useful for those struggling with fear, anxiety, or depression. It will also be helpful for anyone who is fascinated by the potential of dreams for creativity, personal growth, and spiritual transformation. Anyone interested in trance states will find plenty of exciting and transformative practices. People who have dreams that they simply don’t understand will also benefit from the book, as we’ll look at how to unwrap the meaning of dreams, and we’ll see how the symbolic and mythical language of dreams creates powerful stories to wake us up to how we are really feeling and what we really want from life.
How The Art of Transforming Nightmares Began
The true origins of this book are rooted in what happened when I was three years old. My earliest memory is of a nightmare in which I was terrified because I knew I was about to die.
The dream started well—I was in a sparkling turquoise swimming pool, splashing around in all the beauty. Then somehow I was underwater and sinking fast. I was kicking frantically and trying to get back up to the surface, but sinking deeper and deeper. At that point, in a state of pure panic, I experienced a moment of clarity. I realised that I had a choice: either I could stay in this dream and drown or I could wake myself up. I chose to wake up. I did this by rolling over powerfully in the water, and this dream movement was so strong that my physical body rolled right out of bed! The turquoise water was gone; I was in my dark bedroom, tangled up in the sheets.
Alerted by the thump, my mother came running in. She disentangled me and listened to my story. In her efforts to reassure me, she told me something that altered my perception of reality.
She said, “It wasn’t real, Clare.”
I was stunned. I knew for a fact that only moments before, I had been drowning in a turquoise swimming pool! How could that experience not be real? It felt way more real than the dimly lit bedroom reality with my mum whispering so as not to wake up my sister. Parents are gods, right? They know everything about everything. I was a three-year-old child—what did I know? But something jarred me. I understood that there are two worlds: the solid, consensus-reality world where parents know everything; and the quick-to-vanish dreamworld, which feels amazingly real, but which parents know little about and dismiss.
That sense of there being two distinct worlds, one labelled “real” and the other labelled “not real,” persisted throughout my childhood. I grew up with fearsome nightmares, as many children do. I was a sleepwalker, a vivid dreamer, and I suffered from recurring lucid nightmares (when you know you’re dreaming but feel unable to act or wake yourself up). Sometimes I had dynamic out-of-body experiences that involved overwhelming buzzing and shaking sensations before I shot up out of my body and zoomed right through the roof of my house. I also experienced years of sleep paralysis, which is when you fall asleep but your brain remains aware, so you feel trapped in your body and might experience horrendous images and sensations. Although I grew up in a loving home, there was nobody to help me make sense of any of my bewildering sleep experiences. “Last night there was a noise like a steam train and then I flew right up over the house!” would be met with, “Please just calm down and eat your breakfast, Clare.” In the face of these mystifying sleep events, I had to become very resourceful. Although I had many wonderful, joyful dreams, I also had terrifying experiences. I experimented with my responses to different nightmare environments and transitional sleep states.
For the first twenty years of my life, through trial and error, and with no outside help, I worked through my fear. I learned a lot about the glorious potential of these states of consciousness. I love dreams and sleep, and have made it my life’s work to investigate this huge but often overlooked aspect of the human experience. But it often strikes me that not enough is written about the scary side of sleep experiences, and even less has been written about what to do when these experiences happen! People are left to work it all out for themselves, just as I had to as a kid: how to release fear, how to feel safe in unfamiliar spaces when terrifying things happen, and how to use the power of your own mind to turn this into an adventurous exploration of consciousness. Having created my own path to a deep understanding of these states, I feel happiest when I can help others work with them for transformation, healing, and empowerment and to release creative and spiritual gifts.
Nightmares frequently ping into my inbox as people from all around the globe write via my website to share their most horrendous dreams, horrifying sleep paralysis experiences, and trauma-induced nightmares. Some tell me they are cursed by dreams of future tragedies—dreams that come true in waking life. Others plead with me for help with their nonstop lucid nightmares. They write things like “I’m desperate—why is this happening to me?” or “I think I’m losing my mind.” They make frantic appeals: “I’m terrified to fall asleep. Please help me get my life back.” I have a full life, taking care of my family, writing dream books, creating lucid video courses, and leading online groups and lucid dreaming ocean retreats, as well as devoting time to the International Association for the Study of Dreams as past president and CEO. But I take the time to write back to every single person, because these people speak right to my heart.
The good news is that there is a world filled with astonishing marvels to discover, and it lies tantalisingly close to fearful nighttime experiences. In fact, it’s a mere thought away. My aim for this book is to share practical solutions for all manner of fearful sleep events, to help nightmare sufferers fling open the doors of their own wonderful inner world.
My fascination for the world of sleep, dreams, and nightmares led me to teach myself to lucid dream at will. As an undergraduate at Lancaster University in 1995, I carried out my first academic exploration of lucid dreaming. This eventually led to me becoming the first person in the world to do a PhD on lucid dreaming as a creative writing tool, at Leeds University in the UK. My role over the years as a board director of the IASD has enabled me to stay up-to-date with cutting-edge nightmare studies worldwide (some of which are funded by the IASD). In my twenty-six years of dream research and over forty years of personal practice, I’ve developed many original practical techniques to help people resolve and overcome nightmares and sleep paralysis.
Since 2009 I’ve had six dream books published, including Llewellyn’s Complete Book of Lucid Dreaming (my magnum opus, which in part explores how to resolve nightmares), The Art of Lucid Dreaming (a super-practical book to discover your individual sleeper-dreamer type to fast-track your lucid dreaming), and Dream Therapy, on the healing potential of dreams and soul dreams. I also coedited Sleep Monsters and Superheroes, a book on how to empower children with their nightmares, and wrote Breathing in Colour and Dreamrunner (as Clare Jay), two lucid dream–inspired novels that explore themes of lucid dreaming and violent sleep disorders. I have given interviews, presentations, and workshops on sleep disturbances, how to transform nightmares, and how to release fear and embrace calm during frightening experiences arising from sleep. We’ll explore these topics as we go along.
What’s in This Book?
This is a friendly introductory guide to nightmares, with a highly practical focus. Its goal is to give people the knowledge and practical tools they need to reduce their nightmare frequency, manage sleep paralysis and other sleep disturbances, resolve bad dreams, and tap into the creative and healing gifts that nightmares and sleep paralysis visions offer. The Art of Transforming Nightmares is different from each of my previous books due to its focus on disturbing dreams, weird sleep events, and nightmares. It revolutionises nightmares as a creative and healing force and suggests that lucid dreaming may be the world’s most innovative insomnia solution.
There are very few books on nightmares on the market that offer practical solutions. Most tend to be directed at therapists or have an academic, paranormal, or historical approach. As opposed to other nightmare books, this book is all about transformation: turning the darkness and fear associated with nightmares into healing and illuminating gifts. It shows you how to befriend your dreams and nightmares and, as a result, transcend fear in all areas of your life. This book does what other nightmare books don’t—it gets you focused on yourself as a highly individual sleeper and dreamer and enables you to leapfrog to the transformational techniques that are most likely to be effective for you personally.
The Art of Transforming Nightmares serves as a practical handbook to help you understand, step-by-step, why you are having nightmares or sleep paralysis and how you can work with these experiences to understand their message and harness their creative energy and healing power. The book goes step-by-step through the most powerful practical techniques to help people manage sleep paralysis, integrate their shadow aspect, and gain wisdom, healing, and creative inspiration from all nightmares. The aim is to empower dreamers by giving them practical tools to resolve nightmares and other disturbing sleep experiences in healing ways.
Chapter 1 focuses on what nightmares are, what happens when we ignore them, and how they can help us. Chapter 2 unpacks the rich symbolic language of nightmare images and how to understand them, and provides a quick guide to common nightmare themes. Chapter 3 looks at the role of the dark shadow archetype in nightmares—the term shadow is used to describe the parts of ourselves that we are either unconscious of or reluctant to acknowledge. Chapter 4 explores how we can heal our inner child through working with animal-rich, mythical, and common childhood nightmares. This dreamwork enables us to reconnect with our creative, playful, and magical child mind.
The in-depth Nightmare Quiz in Chapter 5 is a cornerstone of the book. A key concept of The Art of Transforming Nightmares is that we are all unique individuals: our relationship with sleep and dreams is unique; we respond to fear in unique ways; and we each have a unique personal history. The Nightmare Quiz encourages you to identify the kind of sleeper and dreamer you are, and when linked with the best techniques for your personal situation, these will make up the backbone of your Unique Nightmare Solution Programme. I’ve created fifteen different programmes for a range of different types of sleeper, from traumatised dreamers to insomniacs. These programmes are for you to combine and customise to create your own Unique Nightmare Solution Programme to fast-track you to a joyful and enriching dream life.
Chapter 6 offers healing techniques for recurring and traumatic nightmares, including those caused by post-traumatic stress disorder, which can require specialised therapeutic techniques and a higher level of support. This chapter dives into the power of storytelling as a tool for nightmare transformation. Chapter 7 explores sleep paralysis, a transitional state where we are consciously aware but feel trapped and unable to move due to the natural muscle paralysis we all experience every night. This chapter provides techniques for releasing fear in scary sleep states and using them as a springboard into a beautiful lucid dream. I also share my insomnia freedom technique here. Chapter 8 lifts the lid on nightmares that transcend space, time, and death, diving into telepathic and precognitive nightmares, out-of-body experiences, and disturbing near-death experiences, as well as suicide dreams and nightmares that may appear to be warnings from deceased loved ones.
In the final chapter, the luminous shadow archetype is explored—this encompasses positive qualities such as our higher potential that we deny or suppress. We’ll explore the lucid void (a dream space devoid of imagery) and the transformative power of fire in nightmares, as well as the nature of light and the vast spiritual potential of dreams and nightmares. Throughout the book, common questions and dilemmas about nightmares and fearful sleep-related experiences are answered as you are taken step-by-step through the most powerful practices for resolving nightmares, anxiety dreams, sleep paralysis, and other nocturnal terrors. Through exploring the creative and transformative darkness of your dreams, you’ll gain a profound and beautiful relationship with them.
In The Art of Transforming Nightmares, I synthesise all of the best-known nightmare techniques with lucidity. This can be waking lucidity (when we engage with nightmares while awake), lucid dreaming (when we wake up inside a dream or nightmare and can engage with it with full conscious awareness), or the relaxed lucid awareness of trance states. The transformative potential of lucid trances is one of my main areas of research, and I have been teaching my original Lucid Dreamplay techniques for over fifteen years.
Within this book, you’ll find techniques that use creative writing, meditation, visualisation, bodywork, transitional sleep states, and spiritual practice, and you’ll discover how to do transformative healing work while in the nightmare itself, through lucid dreaming. The synthesis of these healing, creative, and transformative methods will help you get the most out of the rich and powerful energy of your nightmares. Above all, you’ll discover ways of transcending fear in all areas of your life, freeing you to live a life of happiness and wonder.
Let’s dive in!
1. Ohayon et al., “Prevalence of Nightmares”; Belicki and Belicki, “Nightmares in a University Population.”