Posted on by The Book of Dreams blog

Lost and panic creeps in

Nightmares will haunt you until you pay attention to them. And it’s not only about big traumas pushed into corners of the mind and praying they stay hidden. You can be suffering through some low grade stress and trauma that you’d just as soon ignore and are often able to shove into some corner of your everyday mind and it would stay there if it weren’t for nightmares. But the psyche doesn’t like to be ignored. It likes balance, it likes resolution.

When I ignore my everyday dreams on something that’s annoying me eventually I’ll be visted by a night time panic.

Lately the dark knight begins with me wandering out of some hotel conference into a city I don’t know and after a few twists and turns I find myself totally lost with no idea of which way to go to find my way back. Frequently it’s my car that I’m desperately trying to find or it’s the keys to said car. In either case the dream is suggesting a loss of independence, control, escape, or power.

That’s when the panic begins to swell within and confusion sets in. These are all symptoms of my sense of loss and control over my life and the direction that it’s taking. Lately it has been my sense of justice and what is right and honorable that’s being tested in a world that rewards lies and hate and glorifies ignorance. It’s become a world where violence wins out over love and chaos reigns supreme and its all showing up in my nightmarish dreams.

This kind of nightmare often comes to me more than once and will continue to do so until I deal with it. It is nudging me to pay attention to what is bothering me but not necessarily so that I can work to find a solution but to acknowledge what’s going on in me that I’m suppressing i.e., the first step out of denial toward resolution.

As with all dreams nightmares are there for a reason. They too are there for one’s health and well-being.

Posted on by The Book of Dreams blog

Situational nightmares vs. replicative trauma nightmares

I’ve written many blog postings about nightmares over the years (see a listing at the end of this article) and dedicated sections on both my website and a section in the book, Morpheus Speaks: The Encyclopedia of Dream Interpreting.

But I want to draw a distinction between nightmares that are born of the need for our health and well-being and those that are reenactments of trauma e.g., the kind many people identified as suffering from PTSD. How you treat them is significantly different.

Nightmares come from the unconscious psyche trying to gain your conscious attention usually because there are events and stressors going on around you or at a subconscious level that you are not paying attention to but can affect you negatively if you don’t act on them. Frequently this kind of nightmare will show up repeatedly until you finally act or until the danger has passed. This type of nightmare can often, though not always, be adequately dealt with by going back into the nightmare while not fully awake or enlivening them after one has awakened, gleaning their meaning and hidden message(s) and or changing the narrative and bringing them to a more satisfactory conclusion. This can be done either on one’s own by looking for the positive in the dream or looking for the environmental triggers that may bring them about. Often this can be done with a friend or even in a dream group.

Being continuously bathed in negative images from TV shows and the news media can often be triggers for recurring nightmares. Limiting one’s exposure to these triggers can prove cathartic and helpful in lessoning or eradicating most recurring nightmare sequences or reduce the number of nightmares over time.

However, those who have suffered extreme trauma e.g., having been physically attacked, raped, intimate partner violence, repeated psychological or physical abuse, experience of extreme events of death, near death, or causing the death of another, or extreme uncontrollable and recurring chaos can sometimes relive these traumas over and over again ad infinitum and require medical and therapeutic help to deal with reoccurring and unrelenting nightmares. These relived or replicative moments of trauma through almost nightly nightmare dreams are symptomatic of those suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress and require professional help in dealing with them. To continually relive them can become physically and psycho-emotionally debilitating and fall into the category of a disorder.

Website:

http://thedreamingwizard.com/nightmares_304.html

Blog postings:

Nightmares
Nightmares, Night Terrors, and fear in dreams
Walking the Dark Night
There be Dragons out there: Sailing into the imaginal
The attack of a nightmare often leads to awareness and an opportunity for healing
A drowning dream brings relief