Yesterday we examined the various purposes that nightmares may serve; just to quickly reiterate: a) Warn us about some future danger, threat to our being - this could be an illness. b) Bring awareness to an unresolved emotionally traumatic event as in PTSD; c) A gateway to lucidity. There are others but I wanted to stick to those that are either related to the body or relevant to this program. Today let’s turn our attention to how can we best cope with these traumatic dreams. Once again, just as nightmares are multi-functional, they serve more than one purpose, there are multiple ways to cope with them…You can try these different approaches on your own or you can work with a therapist trained in their use. It really depends on a combination of factors which route you choose – time, financial resources, capacity for self-reflection and personal preference.
Many dreams are feeling based. Strong feelings are the glue that bind the various dream images together. With nightmares as you’ve probably noticed this is particularly true. So one of the approaches that has worked well for me over the years is to really sit with the feelings that come up in the nightmare. Sometimes, that’s all that is necessary to stem the nightmare from repeating itself. Now sitting with the feeling is easier said than done for some and this is where an experienced therapist can come in handy. The trick is how to shut or quieten the mind so that we can really be immersed in the feeling state? The problem with having strong feelings is that there’s a lot of internal chatter that typically accompanies them. And often the internal chatter will loop itself – the same damn thoughts playing themselves over and over again like an awful TV commercial that gets played at every commercial break (thank god for Netflix). In this situation we have to train our attention to come back to the feeling itself minus any thoughts. We need to focus on the feeling, how it feels in our body and try to let go at least temporarily the accompanying story. It is in the feeling that the real energy lies. It is this energy that is seeking release and the energy is powerful and that’s why people are often afraid to confront it. It’s not uncommon to tremble or shake when one attempts to really feel the emotion. It helps to remind ourselves in these situations that the emotions are not us. E-motion is “energy in motion”. The sensations are temporary. If we allow the energy to move, it will most likely move right through us and then a peace will follow. In the peace that follows the storm there is often wisdom and insight regarding the situation that led to the nightmare in the first place. The key it is to let the feelings move through us and in the process maybe move us. If instead we contract with fear and suppress the feelings, try to push them down because they are fundamentally energetic in nature, they will simply rattle our cage in another way – sometimes that other way is by making us sick because illness most often disrupts our lives, our usual routine, forcing us to slow down, take notice of discomfort and pain. In essence physical pain can often take the place of emotional pain. The emotional pain is transmuted into physical pain. It is better if we can just allow ourselves to feel the emotional pain directly. If you have difficulty with this approach keep coming back to the question of “where am I feeling/noticing this emotion in my body” and staying focused on that…and if this approach isn’t working for you, simply toss it out and try another…
Another approach is to treat the nightmare as a call to action. For example, in the green fluid oozing under the car dream that I mentioned in yesterday’s post. Once I recognized that this dream was alerting me to a potential gall bladder problem, the gall bladder being the organ that secretes bile, a yellowish green fluid that our bodies use to breakdown fats, much like the slimy stuff in my dream, I knew I needed to take some action. That action was to simply cut down on the greasy fats in my diet. So I did. Consequently a week later, I had a follow up dream where the same car was now in the repair shop, hoisted in the air with a mechanic working on the very same area where the fluid had been leaking from. So this was the Dream Maker acknowledging that the fix was working – the change in life style was effective, my body was repairing. Of course the other confirmation was from the body itself – the nausea I was experiencing had completely subsided. The good thing about nightmarish health warning dreams is that they tend to be rather direct, straight to the point – literal rather than symbolic. The Dream Maker is saying “there’s little time to mess around.”
A third approach is to change the outcome of the dream by rehearsing an alternative dream. In other words, we go back to the dream and begin to re-dream it while awake, until it takes on a story that we’re comfortable with. It may take more than one pass to bring this about. At first you might find your mind resistant to the prospect of changing the dream content but if you keep at it, you will notice with each pass the new dream is becoming more concrete and the old dream beginning to fade. This technique has proven quite effective in the treatment of PTSD. Why does this approach work? Because it is literally altering the neuronal patterns in our brain. The brain actually has a hard time differentiating between a traumatic waking life event and a traumatic dreaming event. As far as our brain is concerned trauma is trauma. fMRI studies have shown that the same brain centers fire off in either case. So in essence what we are doing when we go back and rehearse the dream with a new more favorable outcome is we are engaging in a form of neurological pattern interrupt. When we experience a nightmare, behind the scenes in our brain, a set of neurons fire off and create a neuronal pathway that can get triggered and reinforced over and over again. When we interrupt this neurological pathway and loop by rehearsing a new outcome in essence we are rewiring our brain. We are now disrupting that disturbing neural pathway by reallocating those neurons to a new path.
A fourth approach to tackling nightmares involves lucidity. If we can become lucid in a dream (aware that we are dreaming) we have the possibility of confronting the bogeyman. If it is a person or monster chasing us instead of running from them we can choose to turn around and face them. Perhaps ask them why they’re hounding us. They might have an interesting response or they might morph into a more benign figure when confronted with such a question or they might just disappear into thin air. Of course the challenge here is becoming lucid in the first place and then have the gumption to turn around and face that which is terrifying. Not a small order for some but one that has proven to be quite effective for many.
Further Reading:
Overcoming Nightmares. (CH 10. of Stephen Laberge’s book, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming)
http://www.lucidity.com/EWLD10.html
References:
LaBerge, S., Rheingold, H. (1990). Exploring the world of lucid dreaming. New York, NY: Random House.
Taylor, J. (1992). Where people fly and water runs uphill: Using dreams to tap the wisdom of the unconscious. New York, NY: Warner Books.
Waggoner, R. (2009). Lucid dreaming: Gateway to the inner self. Needham, MA: Moment Point Press.
Many dreams are feeling based. Strong feelings are the glue that bind the various dream images together. With nightmares as you’ve probably noticed this is particularly true. So one of the approaches that has worked well for me over the years is to really sit with the feelings that come up in the nightmare. Sometimes, that’s all that is necessary to stem the nightmare from repeating itself. Now sitting with the feeling is easier said than done for some and this is where an experienced therapist can come in handy. The trick is how to shut or quieten the mind so that we can really be immersed in the feeling state? The problem with having strong feelings is that there’s a lot of internal chatter that typically accompanies them. And often the internal chatter will loop itself – the same damn thoughts playing themselves over and over again like an awful TV commercial that gets played at every commercial break (thank god for Netflix). In this situation we have to train our attention to come back to the feeling itself minus any thoughts. We need to focus on the feeling, how it feels in our body and try to let go at least temporarily the accompanying story. It is in the feeling that the real energy lies. It is this energy that is seeking release and the energy is powerful and that’s why people are often afraid to confront it. It’s not uncommon to tremble or shake when one attempts to really feel the emotion. It helps to remind ourselves in these situations that the emotions are not us. E-motion is “energy in motion”. The sensations are temporary. If we allow the energy to move, it will most likely move right through us and then a peace will follow. In the peace that follows the storm there is often wisdom and insight regarding the situation that led to the nightmare in the first place. The key it is to let the feelings move through us and in the process maybe move us. If instead we contract with fear and suppress the feelings, try to push them down because they are fundamentally energetic in nature, they will simply rattle our cage in another way – sometimes that other way is by making us sick because illness most often disrupts our lives, our usual routine, forcing us to slow down, take notice of discomfort and pain. In essence physical pain can often take the place of emotional pain. The emotional pain is transmuted into physical pain. It is better if we can just allow ourselves to feel the emotional pain directly. If you have difficulty with this approach keep coming back to the question of “where am I feeling/noticing this emotion in my body” and staying focused on that…and if this approach isn’t working for you, simply toss it out and try another…
Another approach is to treat the nightmare as a call to action. For example, in the green fluid oozing under the car dream that I mentioned in yesterday’s post. Once I recognized that this dream was alerting me to a potential gall bladder problem, the gall bladder being the organ that secretes bile, a yellowish green fluid that our bodies use to breakdown fats, much like the slimy stuff in my dream, I knew I needed to take some action. That action was to simply cut down on the greasy fats in my diet. So I did. Consequently a week later, I had a follow up dream where the same car was now in the repair shop, hoisted in the air with a mechanic working on the very same area where the fluid had been leaking from. So this was the Dream Maker acknowledging that the fix was working – the change in life style was effective, my body was repairing. Of course the other confirmation was from the body itself – the nausea I was experiencing had completely subsided. The good thing about nightmarish health warning dreams is that they tend to be rather direct, straight to the point – literal rather than symbolic. The Dream Maker is saying “there’s little time to mess around.”
A third approach is to change the outcome of the dream by rehearsing an alternative dream. In other words, we go back to the dream and begin to re-dream it while awake, until it takes on a story that we’re comfortable with. It may take more than one pass to bring this about. At first you might find your mind resistant to the prospect of changing the dream content but if you keep at it, you will notice with each pass the new dream is becoming more concrete and the old dream beginning to fade. This technique has proven quite effective in the treatment of PTSD. Why does this approach work? Because it is literally altering the neuronal patterns in our brain. The brain actually has a hard time differentiating between a traumatic waking life event and a traumatic dreaming event. As far as our brain is concerned trauma is trauma. fMRI studies have shown that the same brain centers fire off in either case. So in essence what we are doing when we go back and rehearse the dream with a new more favorable outcome is we are engaging in a form of neurological pattern interrupt. When we experience a nightmare, behind the scenes in our brain, a set of neurons fire off and create a neuronal pathway that can get triggered and reinforced over and over again. When we interrupt this neurological pathway and loop by rehearsing a new outcome in essence we are rewiring our brain. We are now disrupting that disturbing neural pathway by reallocating those neurons to a new path.
A fourth approach to tackling nightmares involves lucidity. If we can become lucid in a dream (aware that we are dreaming) we have the possibility of confronting the bogeyman. If it is a person or monster chasing us instead of running from them we can choose to turn around and face them. Perhaps ask them why they’re hounding us. They might have an interesting response or they might morph into a more benign figure when confronted with such a question or they might just disappear into thin air. Of course the challenge here is becoming lucid in the first place and then have the gumption to turn around and face that which is terrifying. Not a small order for some but one that has proven to be quite effective for many.
Further Reading:
Overcoming Nightmares. (CH 10. of Stephen Laberge’s book, Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming)
http://www.lucidity.com/EWLD10.html
References:
LaBerge, S., Rheingold, H. (1990). Exploring the world of lucid dreaming. New York, NY: Random House.
Taylor, J. (1992). Where people fly and water runs uphill: Using dreams to tap the wisdom of the unconscious. New York, NY: Warner Books.
Waggoner, R. (2009). Lucid dreaming: Gateway to the inner self. Needham, MA: Moment Point Press.