Embracing Nightmares: Advice from a Long-Time Nightmare-Haver

I have been a nightmare-haver since I can remember. When I was about four, I used to try not to fall asleep at night because I was so afraid of my dreams. They were intense and disturbing, often gory, about things no four year old should be thinking about. I’m not sure where I got the information about world wars, tsunamis, and general apocalypses, but I saw them a lot in my dreams. I still get nightmares pretty often, but they don’t bother me as much as they used to.

Trauma and Toxic Stress

First, there are a few reasons recurring nightmares might be happening. I have heard and sometimes believe that children remember their past lives somehow and will dream about them. I also think it makes sense that some kids are born more sensitive and with a big imagination (it me!), and dreams is one of the places this expresses itself. Nightmares can also be a symptom of an unbalanced nervous system, which is often due to trauma or toxic stress, which means living through an extended period where stressors never let up (like, I don’t know, life in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy? Could be that.). 

The cause doesn’t matter all that much, though, because none of these causes can be “fixed” overnight. It benefits most of us to do some work on our nervous systems—therapy, acupuncture, and medication are all strategies that might help on this level (or come see me for some Pathfinding!). I am sure all of these things have helped improve my relationship with nightmares. But the place I really had to start was with embracing them. 

At Least I Slept

If I’ve had a nightmare, at least it means I slept. Something you likely already know if you’re reading this is that us nightmare-havers don’t tend to be great sleepers. We don’t wake up refreshed and ready to take on a brand new day. It’s more like we inject coffee intravenously and try to start doing something so we can get the hell away from our internal hellscapes. But if I was having nightmares, that means I wasn’t up banging my head against the wall. I at least got a little bit of REM sleep. It helps a little when I remind myself of that.

Dream Analysis

I am a huge fan of dream analysis. This may be one of the places I learned my lifelong strategy of overanalyzing things in order to feel them less (hey, it’s got pros and cons!). I found that when I faced the dream, really looked at the pieces and thought about what they meant, the emotional content felt less intense to me. I also find that my dreams often hide secrets in them, usually about how I truly feel about something going on in my life. Nightmares sometimes have really important messages within them. 

When I can remember them, I write my dreams down. Once I have the narrative there in front of me, I ask myself what it’s a metaphor for, and often the meaning of the dream jumps right out. For example, I’m in a small boat on a wide ocean, and dark shapes are rising up at me from under the surface: huge, sleek orcas. I used to have some variation on this dream a lot, and I’ve since learned it means that there’s something I’m not talking about, a secret I’m keeping, or some desire I’m not allowing to be realized. The orcas are big feelings I’m trying to keep under the surface, but they keep needing to come up for air.

I don’t put much stock into the idea that certain dream symbols always mean certain things. When I Googled orcas+dream analysis I learned that it’s supposed to mean that “a particular relationship is making you extremely happy.” Let me tell you it was….not that for me. Rather, I think the symbolism comes from the dreamer, from our experiences and ideas and whatever images we were engaging with during the day. We don’t need dictionaries of dream symbols. We just need to ask ourselves how we feel when we think about a certain image.  

There’s a technique I really like from Gestalt psychotherapy to help dig a little deeper into the emotional content of a dream. To do this one, you separate out each character in the dream: for example, me, the small boat, the orcas, the ocean. Then you ask each character: what do you want? What do you need? What do you not want? The idea is that each character in the dream represents a part of yourself, and this practice can allow the parts to talk to each other. It can be quite illuminating. 

Changing the Dream by Changing Your Life

Learning about what the dream was trying to tell me gave me a lot to think about in terms of how to approach what was happening in my life. When I started being more honest with myself and the people around me, I stopped dreaming about orcas so much. When I started being more physically active, getting stronger, and doing therapy around a trauma I’d experienced, the recurring nightmare about the man eternally chasing and trying to kill me changed—I started to be able to turn around and fight him off.

It’s worth noting that the more you engage with your dreams, the more you’ll tend to remember them. When you write down whatever you can remember every morning, you’ll start remembering more and more. For me, this gave me a sense of control over my dreams (and some great ideas for horror movies). This can also be an entry into lucid dreaming. When I was a child, I was often able to notice when I was in a dream. I had a special chant that I could say to make the dream stop. I’d hold hands with the other children in the middle of the war (!) And we’d all say the chant together and the dream would disappear. I wish I could remember the chant now (I’d be saying it every time I read the news), but it’s sadly lost to my unconscious mind. 

And maybe I don’t need the chant the way I used to. I can handle having a bad dream because I know that my subconscious mind is trying to tell me something. My nightmares no longer need to keep me up at night. 

Learn more about my Pathfinding program where I would LOVE to talk about your dreams: https://www.juliepeters.ca/pathfinding-sessions