Nightmares: From Fear to Freedom
When you lie down, you will not be afraid;
when you lie down, your sleep will be sweet1
– Proverbs 3:24
Have you ever had a nightmarish dream of falling from a great height or being chased by a threatening stranger or fearsome creature? If so, you are not alone in your experience; many people across cultures commonly report having such dreams.2 But while knowing that others have similar nightmares may offer some comfort, it is more comforting still to know that in a frightening dream, instead of fleeing, each of us has the power to make peace with what we fear.
A wide-ranging study on the effectiveness of therapy for dealing with nightmares suggests that changes to the beliefs we hold about nightmares and the ways we respond to fear play a key role.3 This chapter will explore how, by making such changes, we discover that we can acquire power over our fears, that we have within us more light than darkness. In this process, as we gain a sense of mastery over our response to frightening dream content, we learn to trust that we can move from fear to freedom, not only in our dreams but in life too.
The origins of the word ‘nightmare’ are to be found in Anglo Saxon and Old Norse folk traditions. Legend has it that a Swedish king and renowned warrior, Vanlandi, was unknowingly put under a spell cast by a sorceresses whom he had angered. That night while sleeping, he called out that a ‘mare was treading on him’.4 His guards could see the apparition smothering his head, but when they moved to his head to fight the mare off, the mare then trod on his legs and feet, causing his death.5 King Vanlandi lacked a counter-spell, a charm, that could protect him, and so could not throw off the mare, which suffocated and crushed him.6 Metaphorically, this story reminds us that nightmares catch us off guard, and that when they ‘tread on us’, we may find our breathing constricted or our limbs paralysed. We may even fear for our life.
On the other hand, it may have been that the king was suffering from a medical condition called sleep apnoea, in which the airway periodically becomes obstructed during the night. This condition can be life-threatening, and frequent nightmares of suffocation or drowning may alert us to this physiological disorder. It is important also to be aware that nightmares, when they occur repeatedly, even several times in the same night, causing insomnia and distress, may be associated with a chronic sleep disorder known as parasomnia. Such disorders are physiologically driven and may require medical intervention.7 If you think you have a parasomnia, it is best to contact your doctor. Also, if you have been diagnosed with a mental illness or are feeling emotionally unstable, the type of dreamwork described in this chapter may be unsuitable and should only be considered with the guidance of a mental health professional.
According to a study in 2019, not all ‘bad’ dreams should be regarded as pathological. Having identified the neural correlates of fear in both REM dreaming and the waking state, researchers recruited 89 participants to keep records of their dreams for a week. Then, while awake, the subjects were placed in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) chamber and shown distressing pictures in order to see how their brains reacted to the negative stimuli. The researchers found that the more fear people had experienced in their dreams during the preceding week, the less their brain scans showed evidence of a fear response.8 However, the study also confirmed that if the dreamer felt overwhelmed by fear in their dream – so terrifying was the nightmare – far from potentially conferring any benefit in waking life, the effect was negative. This preliminary study on the neural correlates of fear in dreams and in wakefulness supports the theory that dreams can have an adaptive role in moderating our fears and could pave the way for further research on clinical outcomes. To quote Lampros Perogamvros, one of the researchers involved in the study, ‘Dreams may be considered as a real training for our future reactions and may potentially prepare us to face real life dangers.’9
The existential fear of threat to life underlies many frightening dreams, and this foreshadows how we might respond when faced with the actuality of death – either our own or that of a loved one. Yet, paradoxically, to face the fact that death is part of life has long been recognised as a spur to appreciating the full gift of life. Throughout history, philosophers, poets and spiritual teachers have given this paradox deep thought. Plato in his Phaedrus quotes Socrates as saying, ‘True philosophers make dying their profession.’10
Although we may attempt to evade or deny thoughts of death, nightmares forcibly make us aware of our existential vulnerability, shattering the illusion of control we like to think we have over our lives. Yet nightmares also compel us to consider afresh the great questions of life: What matters most to us? What blocks our will to act? How do we remain composed when under duress? How might we feel, live and love more fully, less fearfully? Nightmare scenarios urgently call upon us to develop the courage needed to overcome our fears. Every night, as we surrender to sleeping and dreaming, we have a renewed chance to become aware of the limited view that we hold about ourselves and the world around us, opening the way to a more empathetic and expansive understanding of the natural cycle of birth, life and death.
Some years back, I worked for two years as a volunteer on a hospice ward where terminally ill patients received care during the weeks before their death. There, I found that many people in end-of-life care, who are approaching the mystery of death, welcome companionship, no matter how briefly, while they await the inevitable. From these individuals, I learned much about how even a few moments of attentiveness can create a soulful space, helping to relieve fear and bring about a new sense of calm that enhances both living and dying.
One morning on the ward, the nurses asked me to spend some time with John, a young man who had a brain tumour, describing him as ‘agitated’ and ‘confused’. When I entered John’s room, I found him lying in his bed, eyes closed, tossing from side to side and shouting incomprehensibly as if in torment. I sat down by his bedside and tried to make out his words. Eventually, I realised what he was saying: ‘I’ve got to get off, get off!’ I leaned over, took his hand and asked, ‘Get off what?’ He answered, ‘Off of this life.’ Then he cried out, ‘I’m dying, I’m dying, but that’s okay, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s okay.’ He told me that trains kept going by and he couldn’t get on. Treating the situation as if it were a waking dream, I replied, ‘Don’t worry. You’ve got a ticket, and when your train comes, you’ll have no problem getting on.’ John calmed down and said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve got a ticket.’11 He seemed greatly relieved and fell back to sleep peacefully. Assured that he had his ‘ticket’, he remained calm until he died a few days later.
In reframing our understanding of death, it is also of note that a trailblazing analysis of over 300 near-death experiences (NDEs) by Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick found that 82 per cent of those taking part in the study reported that their NDE lessened or even removed their fear of death.12 When I was volunteering at the hospice, I met an elderly man in the patient lounge who shared a similar experience with me. He asked me, ‘Do you believe there’s an afterlife?’ As soon as I answered ‘Yes’, he raised his fist in the air and exclaimed, ‘Well, I tell you, I don’t believe; I know.’ He continued:
I had surgery for a brain tumour. I wanted to die. I had so much pain. And I did die on the operating table. I saw the other side, I did, and I’m not afraid at all now. I know there’s something there. Saw my grandchild who’d died and my old friends. Some people here are afraid of death, but I tell them they don’t have to be afraid. It’s like going out to the pub to meet your friends. That’s all it is.
He paused and asked if I believed him. I assured him I did. He explained, ‘I don’t talk about it with the folks back home. They’d think I’m touched.’ I told him a dream I’d had about seeing my own mother ‘on the other side’. ‘That’s it!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s all real!’ His declaration ‘I don’t believe; I know’ reminded me of the words of Carl Jung, who, when asked in his later years if he believed in God, replied, ‘I don’t need to believe; I know.’13
Strange as it may seem, every breath we take reflects the cycle of life and death, because the very air we depend on brings us a little closer to death each day. Without oxygen we die, yet the transformation of oxygen into energy leaves by-products of oxidation in our bodies that eventually lead to cell death.14 As every living thing possesses mitochondria dependent on oxygen, death is hardwired into the system. Yet since death has a dreadful finality about it for so many, few of us make peace with it before it arrives and instead fight off ‘letting go’ until the last moment.
There is another kind of death that needs facing in the midst of life, which is ‘dying’ to an old way of being, whether an old attitude of mind or pattern of behaviour. Symbolically, we ‘lose’ our life to find it. When we are able to do this, the energy released transforms both our dreams and life for the good. If we think of death as a transformation of energy, then when something ‘dies’, a good deal of life energy gets freed up in the process, much as fallen leaves in autumn provide nutrients in the soil for the trees to grow the following spring.
I will now give two examples of working therapeutically with nightmares to help transform the emotional energy blocked by fear into making positive life changes. The first concerns Angela, whom we have met in previous chapters. At the time of the following dream, she had been moving towards making time for her creativity, but still felt frustrated by a busy schedule and a lack of real time and space for herself:
I am going on holiday to France on a narrowboat. My sister gives me a map of the area. I know I will be navigating a river but now, looking at it on the map, I realise that pretty soon the river comes to a waterfall, a huge plunge of exactly one million centimetres,15 the size of a skyscraper! I am horrified and decide it’s not safe, it’s not something I want to do ... yet the map is three-dimensional and alive. It shows me that all the boats that have taken the plunge are unharmed. I can see them in one piece continuing their navigation along a peaceful river.
Angela awoke deeply frightened, for although the scene displayed on the magical 3D map had made her curious about the journey, she felt certain that the waterfall would destroy her. Nevertheless, the numinous power of the waterfall could indicate the potential for powerful healing. Subsequently, we agreed to undertake the waking dream process together.
As Angela re-entered the dream, I could see from her face that being on the boat itself gave her pleasure, and so, to help her feel safe, I suggested that she focus on those feelings. In doing so, she felt in touch with a sense of freedom and mystery, aware of these emotions as sensations in her throat and neck. To enhance the feeling of safety, I asked her to choose a sacred word to repeat to herself. Whenever Angela’s fear made her body tense up, we paused so she could breathe deeply and repeat the sacred word until her body relaxed again. Each time this happened, I reminded her that this was a dream and she did not need to be afraid.
As we continued with this dream narrative, the boat drew closer to the edge of the waterfall. At the waterfall’s edge, I asked her to freeze-frame this picture in her mind’s eye and to notice the feelings that arose. ‘Very treacherous,’ she replied. When I asked her if she recalled ever feeling this way in waking life, she described the time some years before when her partner was unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer, dying soon after.
Once Angela had made this connection and could acknowledge her grief, she felt ready to let herself be carried over the waterfall, along with deep feelings and tears. As she did so, she felt a powerful release of energy in the pit of her stomach, her solar plexus. We stayed present to this feeling for some time, allowing it to suffuse her. The tension left her body and Angela sat peacefully for some minutes, until she said that she felt ready to come out of the experience.
I asked her how she would apply the waking dream to her life. She replied that from the New Year, she would keep one day a week free, explaining, ‘The idea is to devote one day to being instead of doing. Nothing allowed – no work, no bureaucracy, not even emails. A small step but difficult to take.’
Angela’s realisation speaks for many of us. In her case, the dreamwork had given her confidence to take decisive action – she had, after all, met the fear that her grief would overwhelm her. Not only did she survive the descent down the immense waterfall, she also tapped into its power, moving through her conditioned limitations to a realisation about how she wanted to change her life.
Figuratively speaking, Angela had descended into the innermost part of her being. The alchemical descent into the ‘innermost part of the earth’ involves what the medieval alchemists called a mortificatio, a breaking down or ‘death’ of a basic substance that was pictorially displayed in images of disintegration and destruction.16 This process of mortification had to occur before the chemistry of a new element could arise. Similarly, in the alchemy of dreams, such imagery often speaks to the ‘mortification’ of a way of thinking about ourselves or others, an attitude we hold in waking life that no longer does us good.
Angela’s waking dream process tracked the associated feelings in her physical body, giving her an embodied sense of her feelings. Later, she also drew a picture of her waterfall ‘dive’. ‘Whenever I look at it,’ she said, ‘I feel enormously energised, especially in the solar plexus. I feel a sense of freedom, my life force awakening.’ The movement from fear to freedom within Angela’s waking dream process illustrates not only a transformation of her fear but also the renewal of her confidence and, importantly, the development of her will.
Although we cannot perceive Angela’s will directly, we sense it through the life-changing decisions she makes as a result of working with her dream. A fully developed will harnesses the power we need to achieve our aims. For this we need to align our own personal will with what Roberto Assagioli, the founder of psychosynthesis, calls the ‘transpersonal’ or ‘highest’ will, giving us the capacity to act with compassion towards ourselves, others and all of creation.17
As the psychologist Mark Thurston has pointed out, we can apply transpersonal will to overcoming our fears in our dream life just as well as in our waking life.18 We can do this, as Angela did, through dreamwork or, as we shall see, in the course of the dream itself. As we learn to move beyond our initial fear, this awareness empowers us to take decisive action and to access with the Higher Wisdom needed to move from fear to freedom.
Once aligned with transpersonal will, we release ourselves from the limitations of the ego and open ourselves instead to beauty, compassion and love. This is the Power of Will – very different to the ego’s ‘will to power’! This will comes as a natural expression of a person’s authentic self. Then, like a bird, we each intuitively know how to take wing.
The second illustration of dreamwork comes from a sequence of three dreams had by Rachel, prior to her having the dream of the painted bowl shared with us in Chapter Five. These dreams took place during a period of terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom:
A terrorist is coming. I’m quite calmly planning my protection and arrange with a woman that I’ll lie down and hide on the floor beneath her seat. I’m satisfied with my plan but realise she’s very small and may move her legs, at which point I’ll be exposed. I decide it’s a risk I have to take.
As Rachel thoughtfully reflected, ‘Here’s a force from within the ego, one of fear and the need for protection. Hiding behind the legs of another suggests a very small child experiencing terror and attack. However, there is a degree of acceptance and surrender to the situation – sufficient protection is available and a resignation to the risk.’
In this dream, we see the awakening of Rachel’s will in her acceptance of risk and in her decision to take evasive action. At the same time, in her waking life, the dream prompts her to explore how a traumatic episode from her childhood influences her reactions whenever she feels vulnerable as an adult.
In Rachel’s second dream, the perceived level of threat has increased:
A man comes to my door – it is glass and ajar. I see him with a knife and gun in one hand and a container of water in the other. He’s here to attack but he’s taking his time in preparation, not barging through the open door but first using the water in some way to prepare the firing of his gun. I make my escape in dread of what is to come.
In this second dream, Rachel again took evasive action, but awoke feeling she would need to face this unknown intruder. Accordingly, with me she later undertook the waking dream process. This time, when she tried to get away, she found herself in water up to her knees, making it difficult to run. She determined to wait rather than running away, choosing instead to focus, with my guidance, on calming her breath. I reassured Rachel that she was safe; she didn’t need to be afraid and could always choose to stop the process. Choosing to continue, after a pause, she suddenly burst out laughing. ‘What’s happened?’ I asked. She explained that the man had dipped his gun in the water and filled it! In a flash she realised that the ‘gun’ was actually a water pistol and so could not harm her.
Rachel’s re-engagement with the dream required her to face the gunman and activate her will to resist running away. As a result, she gained an empowering sense of freedom that changed her experience of the original dream entirely.
Reflecting further on the dream, Rachel likened the watery aspect to her feelings, her unwept tears. She recognised that her actual fear was of the impact of her own feelings – the bullet from the gun – and that she would need to acknowledge those feelings to disarm them.
Rachel then recalled a childhood experience, aged eleven, at her Catholic boarding school, when a nun publicly and cruelly accused her of being ‘evil’ in a school assembly. She described this as a traumatic ‘character assassination’. She thoughtfully shared,
From this I learned to hone the art of containing my emotional response, and it brought a sense of great power, protection and wellbeing that cut through the grief ... Now it’s time to allow a connection to a vulnerable self and surrender to the threat that is posed because that threat no longer applies to me as it did to my eleven-year-old self.
From this dream and subsequent dreamwork, Rachel concluded, ‘I don’t need to protect my wounds. Imperfection and vulnerability are a part of life and being human.’
Not long after, Rachel had the following dream:
I find myself in a darkened room. The door opens and there’s a sense of inevitability. The shadow of a man with a machine gun enters. I raise my hands in surrender and walk towards the window with my back to him. I see the shadowed outline of myself against the half light of the window.
The man is there to assassinate me. He’s from ISIS. I say, ‘I can worship Allah.’ This is to try and save myself but also to let him know that I’m a spiritual person. The execution is delayed for a day. I notice I’m calm in the circumstances.
Rachel saw this dream as an ‘embrace’ of both the spiritual and masculine aspects of herself, as well as connecting with current waking-world events.
Notably, in this dream, she remains calm. In turning her back to the terrorist and telling him that she too can worship Allah, Rachel expresses an openness unfettered by dogmatism while noticing her own calmness in speaking to the ‘terrorist’ – a movement towards a conscious act of will within the dream.
Following this dream, Rachel felt less fearful not only about the actual terrorist threats around that time but also in terms of revealing her own vulnerabilities. The sequence of dreams had allowed for the expression of fear and the facing of it both in sleep and in waking life through the safe environment of the therapeutic setting.
Themes from a living-world nightmare frequently cross into our dreams, challenging us to rise above individual fears and to take action in response. Dreams had by people living under the coercive pressure of the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s powerfully illustrate both the fearfulness of the times and the power of the will.
During the rise of Nazism in Germany, the journalist Charlotte Beradt, of Jewish descent, would awake drenched in sweat from a repeated nightmare in which she had run breathlessly across fields, hiding at the top of towers and in graveyards as she fled from Stormtroopers (Stoßtruppen) intent on torturing and killing her. Upon waking, she wondered if others shared her fears. In response to her dream, she began to collect dreams from people living under the Nazi regime.19
At great risk to her own life, Beradt managed to smuggle the dreams she had collected out of Nazi Germany by using a code to disguise their content and hiding the dreams separately in books that she then sent to friends abroad. In 1939, she fled to the United States, where she eventually gathered the dreams into a volume, first published in German in 1966, and two years later in English, entitled: The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation, 1933–1939.20
Beradt explores how the atmosphere of fear created by the brutal totalitarianism of the outer world entered into the nation’s dream life, and how these dream ‘diaries of the night’ were seemingly ‘dictated to them by the dictatorship’.21 She reports numerous dreams in which people wanted to take action against the regime but failed in their attempt. One man dreamed of having decided to write a formal complaint to the government but ended up enclosing a blank piece of paper in an envelope. He recalled feeling both proud and ashamed for doing so. Another woman dreamed that she attempted to call the police to make a similar complaint but found she could not say a word when the phone was answered. Beradt offers these as examples of how the will atrophies ‘under constant compromising’.22
The nightmare quality of these dreams arises from the tension between the dreamer’s desire to act according to their conscience and their fear of doing so. The conflict can be extreme, as in one man’s dream that he broke his spine while unsuccessfully resisting raising his right arm to make the required Nazi salute to Goebbels.
Beradt also cites dreams of people whose strength of will overcame their fears. For example, one woman who was active in the Resistance dreamed of being pursued by Nazis. Eventually she lost them by jumping across balconies and leaping down to the street near a café. There she noticed two men speaking in low tones. One said, ‘We must protest the transaction’, using the word ‘transaction’ as a code for the regime’s actions. The other replied, ‘Can’t be done.’ Undaunted, the dreamer decided she would enlist both of these men in her cause, whereupon she placed her hands on their shoulders and pulled them along with her. They all shouted, ‘We’ve got to protest!’23 dozens of times in unison while others looked on, nodding in agreement but not joining in. Upon awaking, the dreamer felt the need to continue chanting these words to strengthen her resolve. This dream shows strength of will overcoming ambivalence, expressed in the dream by the earlier exchange between the two men.
People who challenged the Nazi regime faced imprisonment, torture and death. Yet those who could not heed the call of their dreams to action suffered too, for they underwent a ‘living death’, as the Nazi regime invaded both the dreamer’s waking life and their sleep. Commenting on the dreams in Beradt’s collection, the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim observed:
Those who could at least (or particularly) in their dreams say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ clearly could not be rent in their inner life by external reality. But as long as the majority has no unequivocal ‘yes’ or an equally definite ‘no’ to say, the risk of another Third Reich overwhelming our inner and outer life is still with us.24
Rather than viewing nightmares as something to be feared, we can understand frightening dreams as eliciting qualities that challenge us to develop the Highest Will. Dreamwork then facilitates the emergence of these qualities. To encourage this development, we can also undertake practices that calm the mind and put us in touch with our inner, spiritual strength; for example, meditation, repetition of a sacred word, breath practices and prayer – yogas of body and mind that ‘still’ what the yogis call ‘the movements in consciousness’.25 If further help is needed, we can seek additional support by undertaking therapy to explore not only the source of our fear but also to develop the qualities we need to move forward.
Developing our will and a growing capacity to become more lucid in our dreams go hand in hand, as this nightmare of my own reveals:
As I walk down a residential street on a sunny day, a man I do not know approaches me, appearing out of nowhere, startling me. He carries a wide, unsheathed sword and has raised it to strike me. I am terrified and freeze with fear, certain this man will kill me. Unexpectedly, as I look up at the sword, poised before it falls, I feel moved by the sword’s shining strength and beauty and by its unusual appearance in a suburban setting ... Struck by its beauty, I become aware that I am dreaming. I kneel and say, ‘I’m not afraid’, bowing my head.
In that moment, when I became attentive to beauty, I also became lucid and no longer feared ‘death’. My emotional response to beauty overcame my thinking mind’s assessment of the sword as an instrument of destruction, allowing me to move beyond my instinctive fear and to stay attuned to the qualities inherent in beauty – balance, harmony and proportion.26 As a result, my way of being rather than my way of thinking shaped how I related to the man and his sword. Kneeling before Beauty, I bowed my head, free from fear. As a result, the dream then unfolded in ways I could not have expected:
To my surprise, the man then turns the sword on its side and, slowly lowering it, rests it on the crown of my head. I receive its gentle touch as a blessing, an opening...27
Recognising goodness and beauty in times of adversity remains a lesson I continue to relearn in dreams and in daily life.
The lucid dream given here serves to introduce the next chapter, devoted to the practice of lucid dreaming. But, importantly, while lucid dreaming can be a powerful tool for treating nightmares,28 even if we just believe that we don’t have to suffer from our nightmares,29 or if we simply write them down, the frequency of nightmares and their intensity reduces.30
As we develop the capacity to face our fears in our dreams, we are better able to face them in waking life, both individually and collectively. Humanity will need to call upon this capacity in confronting the nightmare scenarios plaguing our world today. We are being challenged to exert and express our Highest Will to live not in fear and antipathy but with trust and love.
We can then become more curious about our own fears and wonder in a more welcoming way what we might like to ask of them and what they might be asking so urgently of us. If after reading this chapter you now feel ready to recall a dream in which you felt pursued by fear – in whatever nightmarish form it may have taken – take a moment to pause and ask, ‘Why are you pursing me? What do you want of me?’ and see what response arises. Simply voicing these words can release fear’s tight grip and begin the movement towards freedom. If the fearfulness persists, you can also tell your fear, ‘You have no power over me.’
When we assert the Highest Will within us, rather than feeling that a sword looms dangerously over us, we can meet what we fear and realise, ‘This is a dream. I don’t have to be afraid.’