Are you suffering from nightmares? Do you have bad dreams? Do you experience night terrors? Are you looking for a way to overcome bad dreams and reclaim your sleep? You’re not alone.
What I’ve discovered through 10 years of dreamwork is that the majority of dreams people do remember are challenging or difficult in some way or another. Truly, I think this is one of the biggest reasons dreams are not used as a psychological or spiritual healing tool as often as they should be. This is an essential part of the work I want to do right now: help people transform their relationship with difficult dreams, and hopefully in the process allow for a deeper connection to your dreams in general.
Ready to learn more? Click here to download your free audio journey and guide!
Aren’t convinced facing into our bad dreams or nightmares instead of avoiding them is actually useful? Click the player below to hear my thoughts and why I think it is so valuable, or read on! I would love to hear your feedback and thoughts!
Why and How To Deal With Bad Dreams
In 10 years of doing dreamwork, I’ve seen over and over that for most people, if they remember a dream, they remember one that was challenging for them in one way or another.
Why? For one, the emotional experiences in our dreams can be so much more intense than our emotions in waking life. We can wake up with a desire to immediately forget what we just experienced. The emotions in the dream resonate within us and we feel haunted by our dreams.
I don’t think this is by accident. As I understand them, dreams shine light on parts of our experience, feelings, and identity that we have been ignoring, suppressing, or denying in some way or another.
That is why I think it’s so powerful to face into your nightmares or bad dreams, because a lot of your personal energy is going into resisting how you feel inside. There is a lot of energy going into resisting the truth of who you are and the experiences that have shaped you into who you are today.
And when we resist so many parts of ourselves, we feel fatigued, we feel overwhelmed, we feel drained. We feel like we don’t know our truth, our purpose. We feel disconnected from ourselves and from the people in our lives.
That’s why our dreams put us in contact with the parts of ourselves we’ve been avoiding, suppressing or denying. Not to punish us or scare us, but simply to bring to light the thing that we are draining our energy trying to avoid. They do not want us to be resisting ourselves like that. They want us to feel whole, in our integrity and in our power.
The purpose of this approach is not to feel good at the end of it, necessarily. The idea isn’t, let’s look at our nightmares so we can see that they are actually positive. It is about letting yourself feel a part of yourself that you feel ashamed, terrified, horrified, or judgmental of. Or just letting yourself be present with something that’s been bothering you in the back of your mind for a long time. That is the goal. To just drop the resistance, and be present with that which you do not want to be present with. And to trust that this shedding of resistance will naturally lead to the growth, healing, and transformation that unfolds when we simply are.
There’s another huge benefit to facing your nightmares: developing courage. How else can we have courage if we are not willing to be present with what scares us? In this sense, our fears are simply invitations and initiations into courage.
Finally, when we are present with our nightmares, we have the opportunity to experience our truth. When we are denying, suppressing, or avoiding parts of ourselves, then we don’t really know what’s true for us. Because we are keeping things hidden, and that means our deepest truth is hidden as well.
Ready to dive in to your difficult dreams? Click here to download your free audio journey & pdf guide! I’d love to hear how it worked for you.
