Dream On: The Form of Your Dreams
Dreams often have an overriding theme or feel to them, whether positive, neutral, or negative. For the most part, during the dream we are totally unaware we are dreaming, though lucid dreams are the exception to that. We wake up sometimes with recollection of the specifics of the dream and sometimes just with a general good or bad (or no) feeling. It’s the bad dreams, the ones with negative emotion or imagery that often impact us the most.
The Dark Side: Nightmares and Daymares
Imagine for a moment that a world leader is concerned about the escalating possibility of a terrorist getting his hands on a nuclear weapon. The leader’s sleep is fitful and most of his dreams center around the theme of a nuclear attack on his home city. This nightmare is recurrent, always with high emotion, and he finds himself not wanting to sleep because of it. Sleep deprivation and the emotion he carries with him when he has the nightmares brings questions to the minds of those around him as to whether he is still capable of using good judgment to make decisions as a leader. And still the nightmares persist.
The real possibility of nuclear war has given more than a few people nightmares. In fact, there have been reports of children having such bad dreams. In today’s world, with increasing fears of both foreign and homegrown terrorists and mass shootings, more and more people may be having bad dreams expressing their real-life anxieties and fears. Nightmares in general have often been described as dreams in which our waking fears have gone wild.
But is that all they are? Do nightmares only have to do with the real, overt fears we face in our waking lives? Let’s explore the “dark side” of dreams for a bit.
The origins of the word nightmare betray ideas of what people thought these extremely vivid, but terrifying, dreams were: “night demons” or “night goblins” or “night spirits,” depending on who you talk to. All relate to the idea that the nightmare was thought to have been caused by evil spirits or supernatural creatures coming into our dreams while we were asleep at night. Children, not being very strong-willed, were considered prime targets for such demons. As children tend to have many more bad dreams than adults, that idea was borne out by simple observation. Or should I say that it was likely that the idea came about because children experience more nightmares and therefore are better targets for the night spirits that invade our dreams?
Then there’s that old wives’ tale (not so old … you still hear it today) that nightmares are caused by eating too much of a good thing (too many sweets, for example) or by eating the wrong thing, more or less our body’s way of seeking revenge for stretching the stomach lining a bit too much. More likely, it’s the alteration of brain chemistry caused by certain foods’ affects on individuals.
Dreams of Disaster … Dreams of Monsters
Many experts see nightmares as very intense dreams that play out some of our childhood fears and feelings of anxiety, others as dealing with the common fears, the archetypal fears, that all people face. And there are several types of nocturnal incidents that people call nightmares. The biggest split between two types of sleep-related terrifying incidents that occur is that between night terrors and nightmares.
Night Terrors
Night terrors are situations in which we wake up, often covered with a cold sweat (missing from reactions to most nightmares), realizing we’re terrified but not remembering why or whether it was because of a dream. In fact, it is very likely that we don’t even wake up fully from a night terror, and we may scream, move about in bed, or even sleepwalk a bit due to the night terror. It occurs in the early part of the sleep period, and during non-REM stages of sleep, when we are not only not paralyzed, but not dreaming.
Night terrors and nightmares are experienced more frequently by children than by adults, and it appears that most of us outgrow these experiences. Both may be experienced by adults, but generally adults, on average, may only have a nightmare a couple of times a year, with night terrors less frequent than that. Night terrors occur sometime within one to three hours after falling asleep, usually in the deepest stage of sleep. Nightmares, although they may happen in just about any REM-sleep period, occur generally in the later hours of the time you are asleep, when the REM stage lasts longer; the longer we sleep, the more the cycle of non-REM/REM reoccurs, the longer the REM stage.
Night terrors are a form of parasomia, sleep disorders that are related to sleepwalking and even grinding your teeth while you sleep. Children who have night terrors often wake up screaming, though they are not fully awake. Parents running into their rooms to see what’s wrong may find them hard to calm down, limbs flailing as though the child is trying to escape something, eyes wide open and even glazed looking, and not recognizing that the parents are there, or possibly not recognizing the parents at all. The screaming and the hysterical fear may last more than a few minutes or end as soon as the parents lay the child back down. If the child actually calms down and recognizes the parents, it’s as if he/she is just waking up. Asked about what scared the child, he/she has no idea, no recall. Parents might simply think this is a nightmare, or might think, if the situation happens multiple times, that the child has a psychological problem.
In fact, neither is the case. During the night terror, the child is simply not awake, but still sleeping. Given that the night terror occurs in the non-REM stages of sleep, the child is truly in the deepest stages of sleep, and may be more difficult to wake up right away after falling back to sleep. In this deepest state of sleep, we can sleep through just about anything, even through our own night terrors. There is no recall of what caused the night terror because the brain activity is very different than REM, from which we can recall imagery and content. We are, during night terrors, not dreaming … not creating signals that might dump into either long- or short-term memory.
Most night terrors occur in very young children, preschoolers according to some experts. They typically occur any time up until about eight years of age, and they may occur in children as young as six months. According to some studies, night terrors occur more frequently in boys than in girls. As we grow up, we tend to outgrow the night terrors; they seem related more to physical activity in the body and brain not related to mind, rather than the physical activity in the brain that stimulates mental processes in REM sleep. In adults, the rare night terror is recognizably a different experience than a nightmare.
A child may not wake at all during the night terror, yet may wake up during a nightmare. With little or no recall of having even had the night terror, there is no comparison to the nightmare. As adults, we may wake up in a cold sweat, our hearts pounding, breathing hard, and knowing we just had something happen to us in our sleep, something probably unsettling or even frightening, causing a feeling of terror or panic, but again with no recall of anything but that vague feeling. We can be disoriented and not fully awake, and sometimes not awake at all. We may have flailed our arms a bit, and the night terror might be accompanied by a bit of sleepwalking. It’s as if our bodies react to something our minds can’t quite get a grasp on, which seems to be exactly the case.
Night terrors may be more indicative of physiological and neurological imbalances than anything psychological, whether in children or adults. Children who are extremely tired may fall into that deepest stage of sleep in which night terrors occur (as might adults, for that matter). Night terrors in adults may be the result of stress, both physical and psychological (though it’s been shown that psychological stress can cause physical problems). Unfortunately, night terrors are a part of childhood, although parents may consider them unusual and even worry when they happen more than once or twice. Most children will have at least one night terror as they grow up, but generally more than that. There is some evidence to indicate that frequent night terrors in children are genetically related, that such patterns of repetition of the night terrors run in families. This makes sense, given their physiologically based nature.
Nightmares
A nightmare is a dream with negative content; it occurs during REM sleep and may last more than a few minutes. There are all the qualities of any other dream, though in the nightmare we have particular fears, anxieties, frustrations, and perhaps even guilty feelings coming out. We are generally not able to move about while having a nightmare, being in that induced sleep paralysis that accompanies REM-sleep and all other forms of dreams.
Nightmares provide information, imagery, and emotion as other dreams do. The content of nightmares is often pulled from childhood fears, though one cannot discount the fears adults take on. While we are children, we are effectively both vulnerable (not capable of being fully functional in the world around us) and protected (by our parents). Such feelings of helplessness and vulnerability can cause fear and anxiety in us as children, and they can certainly come up in our dreams as adults, even being related to our adult lives.
Have you ever felt helpless to affect a particular situation in your life, to remedy it to the better, whether that situation revolves around work, around your relationships, around money, and so on? Nightmares are dreams that can play out any helpless feelings, any fears or anxieties, whether relating to our fears or worries of failure or of being physically injured, or even left isolated and alone. Nightmares may be due to actual phobias (phobic nightmares), but they are more often related to happenings in our lives, due to fears of being fired, recent accidents we have had (or seen), divorce, bankruptcy, and other negatives. Nightmares can even betray a fear of success, something that more than a few people experience.
While the majority of the nightmare-type dreams that we have do occur in childhood and we tend to outgrow them as we outgrow night terrors, nightmares do follow us into our adult lives. As mentioned earlier, we tend to have a couple every year, though experts have done studies that contend that one out of every 200 to 500 adults (discrepancy due to different study results) have them as often as once a week.
According to a national survey commissioned in 1982 by ABC Television and the Washington Post (Henry Allen, “The American Dreams; Fear of Falling and Other Long National Nightmares” Washington Post, July 7, 1982), dreams of falling were the most frequent (71 percent) followed by dreams of seeing a loved one in danger or dead (59 percent) and dreams of “being chased and attacked” (56 percent). Other common themes reported by the survey were sexual experiences (54 percent), accomplishing something great (52 percent), flying or floating under one’s own power (45 percent), paralysis or being unable to run or scream (42 percent … this one makes a lot of sense given our physical paralysis in REM sleep), taking exams (31 percent), missing a plane or train (28 percent), and being naked in public (15 percent).
Naturally, even the negative dream themes may not always be nightmarish, even if there may be sensations of frustration accompanying a dream with such an occurrence. While the falling dreams may be most common in this survey, not everyone who has a falling dream may consider it a nightmare. The type of dream most often considered the common nightmare is that of being chased or attacked, and you often hear people talk about the nightmare they had of someone dying, or the one where they were in front of a group about to act or speak and suddenly noticed that they were stark naked, or the nightmare where you are in a crowd and can’t get anyone to notice you. All of these betray feelings of vulnerability, of helplessness, and of anxieties about not meeting our own expectations (or the expectations of others).
A 2006 survey in the United Kingdom by the hotel company Travelodge points to one in five people having a “bad dream” at least once a week, with 3 percent of all respondents having a nightmare every night. That survey, and others, added additional dream themes such as teeth falling out, dreams with animals and insects, taking an exam, and celebrity-laden dreams.
Other relatively recent surveys have been done cross-culturally, with different lists of the top ten most frequent themes in dreams. For example, a 2008 survey of Chinese students indicated the top two most common themes were school-related and being chased, echoing a 2004 survey of German students. However, a 2003 survey of Canadian students put being chased as number one and sexual experience dreams second.
According to one leading researcher of nightmares, Dr. Ernest Hartmann, there are two types of nightmares. There is a standard nightmare, which is like any other dream, though with the additional label of “nightmare” because of its content. There are also post-traumatic nightmares, a result of the experience of real events in one’s life that may be stressful, scary, and even terrifying. Such events as being in an accident, an earthquake or some other disaster, or a soldier or law enforcement officer who is a participant in a violent scene may cause post-traumatic stress syndrome, which can often have long-term effects. Post-traumatic stress syndrome is being addressed by psychotherapists as a cause of continuing psychological and emotional adjustment problems as people try to relate to their normal lives after experiencing something unsettling or horrible.
The post-traumatic nightmares are often a result of living through disasters or being witnesses to or victims of accidents or personal attacks. Such nightmares are often replays of the actual events, causing people to relive horrible, true experiences, rather than being related to other forms of fantasy-dream imagery. For example, I’ve spoken with people in the San Francisco Bay area who had nightmares for weeks related to their experience of the October 17, 1989, earthquake.
In July 1993, I was at work on the twenty-fifth floor of 101 California Street in San Francisco when a gunman came in and opened fire in a law firm on the thirty-fourth floor—a law firm that was a client of my employer, LexisNexis. The gunman’s spree continued on several floors and the building went on lockdown. Things were more than a bit tense with my fellow employees as we learned what was going on. Police came to all offices until and even after the gunman was found dead (he shot himself, eventually), checking everyone in case he had accomplices in the building (he did not). We all knew at least a couple of the people who were killed. Over the next week or two, I spoke with several people who worked in the building who were having nightmares because of the events, even those who were not witness to any of the sights or sounds of the actual shooting.
Veterans of Vietnam and other wars, as well as police officers involved in shoot-outs, who have experienced situations where people die in front of them or where they (the dreamers) caused those people’s deaths (whether justifiably defending themselves or not) may relive the experiences. In addition, such traumatic experiences may even show up in waking experience, as “daymares” (more on this in the last section of this chapter).
Such trauma-related nightmares were also reported by many after the 9/11 attack, and examples are easily found with a simple Google search. There were also a number of people who reported having prophetic dreams of the attack, some with greater detail and others just an emotion-filled dream, who also continued having nightmares after.
Disaster Dreams Impact Us
In looking at psychic experience in dreams, there are numerous reports of both precognitive and clairvoyant dreams of disasters that may affect the dreamer emotionally. If I somehow psychically pick up on the death and devastation caused by a major earthquake or terrorist attack, I may react to that information in my dreams as though I had actually witnessed it. Since psychic perceptions tend to be very emotionally charged, one may receive precognitive/clairvoyant messages from both those who have been injured in the disaster as well as from the witnesses who look on in horror.
Unfortunately, the person experiencing such a psychic flow may actually have a recurring nightmare of the event, a form of psychically induced post-traumatic nightmare. There appears to be less of an emotional attachment to the nightmare if it’s recognized as a psychic dream, and it’s likely that, on some level of awareness, there is that kind of recognition (that this is not a normal dream) and the nightmare will not reoccur. On the other hand, if the dreamer feels that what was experienced was a clear, precognitive dream, there may be an overwhelming sense that he/she should try to do something about the dreamed-about situation (warn people at least). In chapter 10, I’ll discuss the issue of acting on such premonitions.
Such psychic dreams of disaster that may reoccur also may not be very clear. I’ve spoken with more than a few people, including a few psychics, who had non-specific dreams about the 1989 San Francisco quake. Only two people I’ve spoken with claimed to have had a vivid dream of the quake and its effect on the Bay area, and neither of them consider themselves psychic. The psychics I’ve spoken with reported a general feeling of dread that something bad was going to happen in the area, but no specifics. And most of them reported the sensation building in them or the dreams occurring within forty-eight hours before the quake. This may not be related to precognitive experience, but to a sensitivity to the geomagnetic field of the earth, or some other such physical variables that relate to earthquakes.
However, unrelated to the geomagnetic field would be similar experiences of people before the 9/11 attack. Whether in dreams or while awake, a number of us who were members of a listserv for intuitives and researchers at the time expressed a general feeling of dread and foreboding the night before the attack, with some claiming that they woke up with that feeling, even though they could not recall the specific content of their dream. In my own case, the best way I can explain my feeling of dread was that there was “a disturbance in the Force” that kept me wide awake until hours after midnight, and something in a dream woke me up suddenly at the same time the first plane was hitting the tower.
In dealing with post-traumatic nightmares, feelings of guilt and helplessness may accompany the dreams. The best way to deal with such nightmares appears to be to talk about the nightmare and the events that the nightmare represents. Working through the feelings brought on by the original event appears to best alleviate trauma related to experiencing that event, whether the feelings keep coming back in nightmares or not.
The Standard Nightmare
Again, standard nightmares are dreams that go a bit further from any feeling of normal frustration or guilt or slight bits of fear. They are extreme in presenting the imagery in ways that induce negative emotional reactions that may spill over to our waking consciousness. Anxiety in nightmares may reflect some situation we saw as a failure in our waking lives, or may simply relate to not being able to function normally in our dreams, a sense of helplessness as the dream proceeds around us. Nightmares may reflect reactions to real events, essentially representations of anxiety or fear surrounding dealing with those events (divorce and other relationship issues, work problems, health problems, death in the family, accidents, and so on) where we feel that normal means of dealing with those situations are not effective.
Nightmares may be triggered by such stressful or traumatic situations as mentioned above or by any situation that may remind us of feelings of vulnerability or helplessness, such as what we felt when we were children. Nightmares may sometimes last longer than other dreams, as though the emotion carried by the dream takes time to build. Of course, what also appears to happen is that as the emotions build, we may react to them in that nightmare and wake up. If the nightmare brings on an intense reaction quickly, it will generally be a shorter dream.
The content of nightmares may relate to our waking state as much as any other dream. Our moods just before going to sleep do affect our dreams, and therefore may cause a dream to be viewed as a nightmare. Scary movies or books may make us feel uneasy enough that it’s not only tough to go to sleep but we end up with some of that scary imagery in our dreams. This is especially true with children, according to a recent study.
Nightmares may be excellent indicators of problems we’re facing in our lives. Looking at what goes on in a nightmare as an indication of an unresolved issue or as some way of telling ourselves that there’s something wrong here may yield much information about ourselves. Nightmares may be warnings to the conscious mind by another part of ourselves, integrating information about ourselves or about situations in our waking lives, the outer world, that we’re not consciously aware of. As all the information that comes through our senses is processed, there may be items that we miss on the conscious level, which we are made aware of through dreams and nightmares. Recurring nightmares can tell us as much about an issue that needs addressing as can any other recurring dream—it’s recurring because we’re not dealing with it, whatever it turns out to be.
To bring it back to the psychic side of things, nightmares can be actual warnings of dangerous situations or individuals that will affect us or others. The key is to face the information in that nightmare and ask yourself “Why is that there? What can it be saying to me … or about me?”
Dealing with Nightmares
There are many views on dealing with nightmares. Dr. Ernest Hartmann, author of The Nightmare: The Psychology and Biology of Terrifying Dreams, has written that we can avoid nightmares by figuring out what it is in our life that makes us afraid or feel helpless. Some awareness of what really frustrates us or stresses us out may help us recognize the nightmare imagery for what it is more easily. Dr. Stephen LaBerge and many others suggest facing up to that nightmare monster in the dream. Either through the use of lucid dreaming or that by programming yourself with the idea that you will turn and face whatever is bad in that nightmare, you may be able to confront the nightmare image and overcome it, absorb it, or get information that may shed light over what it represents.
“Why are you here? What do you represent? What do I need to be aware of in myself to change the outcome of the event represented by this image that frightens me?” Turning in the nightmare and facing up to your fears, rather than running from them as we normally do in nightmares, may in itself be enough to alleviate the point of the nightmare, to allow you to recognize the image for what it really represents. Asking the above questions may take you a bit further in dealing with the issues in your waking life. It appears that facing up to these nightmares makes the most awful issues easy to deal with, and helps make sure they don’t reoccur. Remember, it’s typically the unresolved issues that cause recurrent nightmares.
You must acknowledge the nightmare images in order to deal with them. Some experts feel that to ignore or avoid these images that are trying to tell you something may send those feelings or other source issues deeper into your unconscious, to later reappear (possibly even stronger). Acknowledging the images, no matter how fearful they seem to be, as part of yourself, realizing that the monster you see in the nightmare is part of you, conjured up by you to tell you something, can often be enough to end the nightmare. The belief that the image “has no power over me,” whether occurring in a lucid dream where you are aware you’re in a nightmare or whether you simply believe that in your waking state, helps you overcome and work through the nightmares.
Facing up to the image may be the best way to go while in a lucid dream. Reactions in lucid dreams to nightmarish imagery may involve actively changing the dream to remove whatever that bad image is. In other words, if you are lucid in a nightmare, and aware that you have the power in that dream to change things, you may be tempted to simply whisk away the bad stuff and replace it with something else, or simply remove yourself from the scene, escaping in effect. According to Dr. Gayle Delaney, that might not always be the best way to go. This could cause the nightmare to reoccur simply because you are not dealing with or exploring what it is the images represent. The issues in the outer world, the waking world, that the images symbolize are not recognized or dealt with, and therefore the nightmares may continue.
Adults Having Nightmares
Before you get too involved in worrying about how you’re going to deal with your next nightmare, keep in mind that most of us rarely have nightmares, unless we end up in a situation where post-traumatic stress syndrome could cause them (or you really are buying into the fear provided by many horror films … though that type of nightmare rarely reoccurs). What about those people (the 1 in 200 to 500) who have nightmares frequently?
Dr. Ernest Hartmann has studied the types of people in this group, the frequent nightmare sufferers, and come to some conclusions. Hartmann talks in terms of people having boundaries between being awake and dreaming, and between reality and fantasy. People with thin boundaries between these states are most prone to nightmares in adulthood. They are people who are usually very sensitive (possibly hypersensitive) and trusting (sometimes overly so). There is often some ambiguity with regards to sexual identity, not being either strongly masculine or feminine, often recognizing both sides of themselves (though not necessarily or even generally homosexual or even bisexual). They may be prone to daydreaming. Many nightmare sufferers have difficulty waking up or gaining certainty that they are really awake (and not still asleep and dreaming).
And, interestingly enough, they are often people with very creative inclinations toward art, music, writing, and other such endeavors. Besides Robert Louis Stevenson, who had a nightmare that brought him Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein as a result of a nightmare.
Creative people tend not to be rigid in their thinking patterns, often looking at the world around them in a number of ways to get different viewpoints. An ability to fantasize, to merge reality and fantasy, obviously helps the creative person, and may allow for more non-realistic imagery to come through in dreams.
As we grow up, most of us learn to not only differentiate between what is reality and what is fantasy, but to build boundaries for ourselves separating the two. This not only helps us from mixing up the two (fantasy and reality) on a conscious level, it also helps protect us from potentially damaging or frightening information that might keep pouring into our dreams and conscious awareness. People with thin boundaries may not have such well-developed defense mechanisms, and therefore may end up with a spill-over of fantasy imagery in dreams and nightmares, as well as in daydreams.
Daydreams
Daydreaming, fantasizing while awake, is a natural state for many people. Our minds tend to wander a bit into our own memories every day, and may purposefully seek out certain images because what is in front of us in reality is pretty dull and boring. Daydreams tend to involve a replay of events, perhaps with slightly different outcomes, or may be a practice for an event about to happen (like asking someone out on a date or asking the boss for a raise). Daydreams tend to involve some emotion as well.
Most daydreams happen spontaneously and are close to, if not exactly about, everyday events. People can, however, be deliberate about their daydreams, causing them to run a certain course beyond their own lives (putting themselves “in other people’s shoes,” so to speak) or even leap beyond the bounds of reality as we know it. As a science fiction and comic books reader, I realize there has to be a certain amount of structure within someone’s imaginings to create the stories in the books I’ve read. Writing about fictional characters at all involves a bit of daydreaming as you try to project the story in your mind and get it down in your computer or on paper.
Daydreaming can even be encouraged and guided by outside forces. Guided visualization, where another person (or audio recording of another person) suggests a certain course for your daydream, can be of great benefit. Besides being a way to exercise the imagination, guided visualizations have been helpful in uncovering emotional problems and in doing a bit of self-healing; they are often quite beneficial to people. You can consider such outer-caused daydreams as a form of meditation.
Daymares
Unfortunately, with the good comes the bad, in this case in the form of a daymare—daydreams of disaster, of death, of accidents, or of other negative outcomes of events that could adversely affect you and others. People do have daymares caused by fears and worries (“what if my wife is cheating on me?” or “what if this plane I’m about to board blows an engine?”), and they can be quite similar to nightmares we have while asleep. Daymares may be replays of tragic events witnessed or participated in, and may be caused by post-traumatic stress syndrome or simply by watching the evening news and worrying about what you see (which is often negative, violent imagery). They can result from stress at work or by socially emphasized problems (such as AIDS or the threat of a terrorist attack).
The differences between daymares and nightmares are often quite pronounced, as are similarities between the two. The same issues and experiences that cause nightmares may result in daymares. The differences, however, are important. With a nightmare, you are asleep, and unless you’re in a lucid dream, have little conscious control over what goes on. With a daymare, you are awake, capable of consciously recognizing what’s there, and capable of consciously ending the scenario, or of being distracted by other people or outside happenings (thereby ending the daymare). And the daymares relate more closely to virtual reality than do the fantastic images that may appear in a nightmare. (Although it may be quite unrealistic for many to daydream that your spouse is cheating on you, that’s more realistic than dreaming your spouse has become a fifty-foot-tall monster, isn’t it?)
Fantasy-prone individuals may, of course, include quite unrealistic imagery in their daydreams and therefore in their daymares (do horror fiction writers have daymares or do they simply daydream since their own imagery doesn’t generally frighten them?).
What About Psi?
Psi ties in here in a couple of ways.
There have been studies of what personality characteristics are included in people who are more psychic than others. One of those is creativity. In studies with artists, writers, and musicians as compared to control groups not in the creative arts, the creative types came out ahead, often significantly so, in results indicating psi ability in the tests. Creative types appear to be more psychic, yet that may be simply because they tend not to view the world in absolutes, but more in possibilities than others—though I know plenty of individuals who cross that line. They may be more open to psi or belief in psi, and therefore allow the experiences and information to flow rather than dismissing it as not real or blocking it out altogether.
Psi experiences occur not only in dreams and nightmares, but also in daydreams and daymares. In fact, you might have a psychic experience with vivid imagery or information presented to you while awake and dismiss it as a daydream, or there may be a sudden flash of a disaster occurring that you shake off as imagination (albeit negative).
How do you tell the difference? As you will see as you read on in this book, the difference tends to be in the quality of the experience—you just know. Whether you act on that information, or even can act on it at all flows from whether you can even recognize the information as real and not imagined. Unfortunately, this is not easy to do, especially when the information comes through while we are daydreaming; it seems easier to rationalize it away.
Dying in Your Dreams
One other question comes up with regards to nightmares. As mentioned, the original thought surrounding nightmares had to do with evil spirits invading our dreams, with probable intentions to do us harm. The plot of the movie Inception is predicated on individuals being able to enter and affect the dreams of others. The entire Nightmare on Elm Street series has to do with the spirit of Freddy Kruger invading the dreams of the living and, basically, hurting or killing them in reality by affecting them in their dreams.
What happens if you die in your dream or nightmare? From personal experience, I can say I have died in a couple of dreams and I’m still around. I did not, fortunately or unfortunately, continue on in my dream to an afterlife, although I remember one dream from college days where I dreamed of dying and haunting my roommates (it was fun!). I’ve spoken to others who have also experienced death in their dreams, and I’ve continued that falling dream, as have others, until I actually hit the ground. Usually, I just got up and brushed myself off, having no damage to my (dream) body at all (eat your heart out, Wile E. Coyote!). Of course, I was a fan of Looney Toons growing up.
Do people die as a result of their nightmares? Probably not. The probably is only because if people really have died as a result of a nightmare, we have no information that the dream was the cause of death, no way of knowing since there’s no one around to tell us. No ghosts, to my knowledge, have shown up claiming this to be the way they died. So, since many have reported dying in dreams and lived to tell about it, we can probably assume there’s nothing to worry about.
We have much to learn from nightmares (and even daymares) as they truly betray what is bothering us, what our deep-seated fears and anxieties are, and what the unresolved issues are in our lives. Looking at nightmares as helpful tools, as indicators of those unresolved issues, may make them easier to live with.
Then again, maybe you can use that nightmare to become the next Stephen King or Dean Koontz …