Nightmares and How To Manage Them!

@devu2001

Awesome, glad to know that this helped you in some way! Wishing you all the best, lovely. :3

Hehe, I actually had a nightmare last night! If only I read this then :3 well done, lauren!

@Joe2017

Awh, sorry to hear that you had a nightmare last night! I hope that this technique proves useful to you in the future. Thanks for reading, lovely! Wishing you all the best. *huggles* :3

OMG

I've had nightmares every damn night from as far as I can remember. Most of them don't even impress me anymore. Last night I dreamed I was stalked by a putrified dead girl that jumped from heights breaking all her bones and than ran unnaturally fast to get me. Every time I fled, I saw this thing falling down from somewhere else and then running towards me. It was scary, but kind of cool to think about it. I have more problems with nightmares that are way more personal and disturbing

Oh, right: 4-5 years ago, my dreams became more and more lucid, which means that I knew I was in a dream. So sometimes I'm able to try this strategy directly inside my dream.

Some info about dreams: often, especially if recurring, they are an attempt of your brain to process emotions or facts it can't make sense of and has a hard time coping with. So it tries to re-inact them. When the emotion is processed, by dreaming or in real life, the recurring nightmares should go away.

And that's interesting, because in my nightmares, although I know I'm in a dream and I try to make it go my way, I can't. Yep. Both because what I try to make happen doesn't happen, or because the situation that generates the emotion that has to be processed finds it's way to return in another way. It has to be processed, no way you're going to miss it.

For exemple: in the dead girl dream, I tried to make a good spirit appear, so that it would fight the girl, but nothing. It didn't appear or it lasted for half a second before vanishing. I tried to make the girl slow down: damn it, my dream my rules. She's got all her bones broken, it's not realistic that she can run so fast! But no way. She ran as she pleased.

But actually, in some dreams, I managed to make them end better, and what I did (I don't always remember this while I'm dreaming) was drastically reducing my fear of the situation, and becoming confident that I could manage it, instead of trying to change the dream. Two examples:

I dreamed that I found myself enlisted in the army, because a war was coming and we had to defend the front. Our division had army uniforms, guns that looked like toys and a transceiver that I didn't know how how to turn on. We were all recruits. When the enemy arrived, they blinded us with gas granades and then it was a massacre. I knew I was in a dream, and at one point I thought "what do I have to loose? Our commander clearly left us here to die, we have no hope to win, but I can try to lead a retreat and hope some of us will survive" that's where things started to go better. It was a mess, but I managed to escape with other 3 recruits. We were the only ones to survive, we stole some equipment and true weapons from dead enemies and we were walking in the woods, feeling stronger and talking about what to do next.

Another example: I was in a white empty room with Gollum. Yep. It could have ended so bad... I tried to look for an escape and thinking about a strategy to fight him, but then I though "I'm in a dream. How dangerous can be Gollum in a dream? In the worst case, I'll wake up" so I sat on the floor and greeted him. Next thing I remember, there were light gray branches on the floor, and I was trying to build a home, with Gollum, as you would do at the beach, talking nicely and trying to persuade him we were in a dream.

So I was thinking, when possibile, instead of thinking how to CHANGE the dream, couldn't we think about how to manage ourself in that situation, without removing the emotion we have to process? I found it way more useful. Just a tuought