Pinaly - My experience over 50 years is that nightmares are an attempt by a deeper self to face a trauma or difficult feeling we refuse to face consciously because of the fear or distress such feelings cause us.
As example
A THING is marauding around the rather bleak, dark house I am in with a small boy. To avoid it I lock myself in a room with the boy. The THING finds the room and tries to break the door down. I frantically try to hold it closed with my hands and one foot pressed against it, my back against a wall for leverage. It was a terrible struggle and I woke myself by screaming.’ Terry F.
When Terry allowed the sense of fear to arise in him while awake, he felt as he did when a child - the boy in the dream - during the bombing of the second world war. His sense of insecurity dating from that time had emerged when he left a secure job, and had arisen in the images of the nightmare. Understanding his fears he was able to avoid their usual paralysing influence.
Another example of another method to deal with such fears -
A little Kuwaiti boy survived the Iraqi invasion of his country and was living without his father, a prisoner of war. But a recurring nightmare, of Saddam Hussein stabbing his brother to death, was prolonging the trauma.
One night he had a different dream: This time he carried the knife, becoming a hero who kills his nemesis. The emotional weight he carried disappeared. Altering recurring nightmares may hold a key to recovery for many victims of trauma, says Dr. Deidre Barrett, a professor of behavioral medicine and hypnotherapy at Harvard Medical School. Barrett spent a month in Kuwait City after the Gulf War training other therapists to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. She says, “Just changing something in the dream gives people such a sense of mastery in controlling things.”
“Just that sort of dramatic sense of confidence he had in a dream carried over into his waking life.”
Research and human experience over many years have shown ways we can work with the wonder of your dream process. From such research Dr. Nielsen and Levin suggest that dreaming attempts to create ‘fear extinction’ to deal with painful or fearful dream experience. The dream process succeeds at this when we do not wake from a fearful dream. When we wake from a nightmarish dream it has failed. As Dr. Nielsen points out, ‘If you feel yourself falling spread your arms and learn how to fly’.
This is not a crazy suggestion. Dreams are simply feelings put into images. Nothing can actually hurt you while you dream. If you really take that in and decide to confront your dream fears – don’t confuse this with externally dangerous things – you can transform your inner world of anxieties, heal past hurts, and open up the treasure house of your potential. When this happens it flows into confidence and pleasure in daily life.
Remember that in dreams you cannot be hurt or die. Whenever we dream its images are not like real life, because a dream is nothing like outer life where things could hurt you, but is an image like on a cinema screen, so that even if a gun is pointed at you and fired it can do no damage – except if you run in fear; so, all the things that scare you are simply your own fears projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind.
So try this -
All the images, people, animals, places we see in our dreams, are simply your own feelings, fears, hopes and wonder projected onto the screen of your sleeping mind as images. So, it makes sense to take the image of your dream person, thing or animal back into you and own it. In that way, you are actually meeting and dealing with the things about yourself you are not owning or conscious of. That is why dreams are often difficult to understand, because we are hiding things from ourselves.
One of the most important things about actually understanding your dream rather that interpreting it is to become the dream person or object – to actually completely identify with it. This needs to be practiced as most people feel the dream person or object is something other than themselves and are often hesitant to become it. For instance the Devil in a dream is simply your own emotions and fears given an exterior image. Also a teacher or Mentor is in a dream the highest wisdom in us. In doing this you can step beyond the imagery of the dream into direct experience of yourself in all its variety and wonder.
So to do this the dreamer next chooses one of the characters, images or objects in the dream to explore. The character can be themselves as they appear in the dream, or any of the other people or things. It is important to realise that it does not matter if the character is someone known or not, or whether they are young or old. The character needs to be treated as an aspect of their dream, and not as if they were the living person exterior to the dream. So do not attempt to describe them an outside person, but the dream character.
In choosing an image to work with, such as a person, a tree, cat, place, or an environment like the street in the example dream above, it must again be treated as it appears in the dream, not as it may appear in real life. One can take any image from the dream to work with. But do not start thinking about the person or thing, imagine yourself as them or it – step into their body. Then wait for any feelings to arise and describe them, avoid trying to understand it by thinking about it – dreams arise from a level that preexists thinking. See
https://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/masters-of-nightmares/Tony
