Three different nightmares in less than a week

[Tamsyn]

Up until recently I have always slept rather soundly, on occassion I do have rather vivid dreams but it has been years since I have had an upsetting nightmare and in under a week I have now had three.

Monday's Nightmare:

I am having a serious conversation with a man I know called Sam about how he should leave me alone because I care very deeply for my boyfriend. This man scares me and I do not like him as a person at all but I feel the need to help him. I am watching myself from another person, as though I am split in two. I watch myself have sex with him, I am horrified and scared.
We are sitting on the edge of a rocky cliff with some people I dont know. A woman is sitting on a rock that is crumbling underneath her and I am desperately trying to help her by getting her to inch up to safer ground. This woman is important to Sam. Suddenly the rock breaks and we watch her fall endlessly to her death. I look around to comfort Sam and everyone is gone. I am alone and running. I need to find Sam. I come across an old man surrounded by starving children. I give them fruit and beg them to help me.
I wake up confused and upset.

Tuesday's Nightmare:

I am in a house with my parents asleep in a room somewhere. I feel like a child again in spite of the fact that I am an adult and have not lived with my parents for almost 8 years. My youngest brother is awake and with me. He is trying to convince me to go outside into a forest. I open the door to look out and it is night time. I look towards the forest edge and I can see a carnival. There are no people and the carnival looks abandoned but the merry-go-round is on and playing that horrible carnival music. But the lights are off which makes it seem incredibly strange.
I am filled with a feeling of absolute terror and I know that something is coming up the slope from the carnival to kill me. I try to slam the door shut so that I will be safe and I can feel something pushing against the door from the other side. My brother is standing behind me laughing and I wake up in absolute terror.

Wednesday's Nightmare:

I am in a city I do not know and I have come to learn to be a photographer. I will be taught by someone who is apparently the best and he will be my mentor. He wants me to photograph a woman riding a horse. She doesn’t want to help me, its not that she doesn’t like me, she feels it is beneath her to help. I am holding the camera and I am horribly nervous, I cant seem to hold it steady and I constantly miss the shot.
There is a horrible noise in the background, like construction noises and it is making it hard to concentrate.
The background is putting me off taking the photo and when I finally see a beautiful backdrop of forest I decide that when the woman on the horse rides past there I will take the picture. I try to back up to fit everything in and I am suddenly surrounded by while deck chairs. I try to move them quietly out of the way but they all come crashing down causing the horse to frighten and the woman to fall off. She isn’t hurt but decides to leave. I have not managed to take the picture and my mentor is disappointed. He berates me for not trying hard enough and that I have done nothing in all the time I have been there. I haven’t taken a single photograph. I am devastated. He instructs me to take a photograph of some grubs or bugs and leaves me alone. I wake up crying.

I wake up exhausted and I find myself staying up later and later avoiding going to sleep because I am scared of what my dreams will be.

[Tony Crisp]

Tamsyn – To have so many nightmares close together shows you are in an important point in your life. To be honest you cannot usually have nightmares until you are ready to face what they are about – in your case fear of the unknown and scary things that confront you, and fear of failing.

But the important thing is that nightmares are not there to scare you silly, but as a way to heal something that is holding you back from growing into the person you are capable of. So the thing is to feel the fear and face what it is demonstrating. For instance I once dreamt that I had to walk along a road through a jungle to get to a town I needed to go to. I woke in terror as lions could jump out on me on the road. So the next day I practised in imagination walking along the road and letting the lions attack me – after all what is there to be frighten of, they are only images?

I found that the first lion was really scary, and I felt it was the fear of walking alone. So I realised that because I had become self employed for the first time I was really scared of not surviving. But each lion I met I knew what it was about, and so decided to go it alone and have survived self employed for the past 30 years.

So I feel sure you can face your own fears and come out the other side victorious. See http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/masters-of-nightmares/

Tony