Nightmares

I would like to say that the nightmares have lesson but they have not - so I guess it is good that I am not sleeping much. My stomach is on fire all the time because of the ulcers and I am learning that trying to breathe is not as easy as everything would like to believe, including me.


Sleep a little, dream a lot! It really does sucks. You are trapped in your own mind trying to out run what is troubling your mind. At times people believe that it is easy to just wake up but that is not true or let me put it this way. It does not matter if you wake up from it early or later because the truth is a nightmare - is reminding you how bad things truly are and that as much as you want to be free of them, you never will be. All you can do is hope that one day they will not be as bad.


Why would anyone suggest that nightmares or anxiety dreams might be helpful? If you are in the half of the population that has experienced an anxiety dream or nightmare within the last month, then this may even be what you are wishing you could get rid of, right? Some people who had nightmares or recurring dreams early on in life even manage to block their dream recall entirely in order to stop being upset by such experiences. This unfortunate view of "bad" dreams as things to avoid is precisely the reason for the above title and for this article. An avoidance or denial approach is much like putting a Band-Aid on a car's blinking oil light because the light seems annoying. 


Of course, fifty or a hundred miles later, it would be greatly preferable to have understood the warning. Obviously, it is even better not to have the light blinking, but if it does, then it is important to do something about it since it is there for a good reason. One certainly would not be very wise to disable it. Though perhaps not obvious, the simple fact is that most nightmares and almost all recurring dreams are similarly trying to provide an extremely valuable service to the dreamer. If we block them, we are likely missing their immediate benefit; if we remember but ignore them, we may well be 
missing the vital message that they are trying to bring us about our life.

Almost everyone has experienced one or more dreams that contain anxiety or outright fear. For some, unpleasant dreams or nightmares recur repeatedly; for others, the content may change while the theme remains the same, such as scenes of falling, or of being pursued or attacked, late or unprepared for a presentation or an exam, stuck in slow motion, unable to move or scream, or naked in public, to name a few common themes. This type of experience, when unpleasant, is usually associated with lack of progress by the dreamer to recognize and solve related conflicts in life.

Though it has been scientifically proven that we all dream every night, fear of nightmares or other anxieties or misguided beliefs about dreams and the unconscious can block dream recall. This can usually be overcome by learning about the useful nature of dreams and by recognizing that the majority of nightmares, like a bitter but quite necessary medicine, represent opportunities for personal healing through much-needed emotional release. They are often indirectly warning us about current behavior patterns or psychological imbalances that we need to remedy if we do not want such unpleasant dreams to repeat, or worsen. Sometimes, such imbalances or patterns resolve themselves as the dream percolates into waking thought and we unknowingly respond and make adjustments in our life. But if we block, deny or ignore such messages from the subconscious for too long, then it usually speaks ‘louder’ to get our attention often by bringing related events, which I call daymares, into our waking hours. These daymares show up as sickness, accidents, relationship difficulties or other unfortunate personal circumstances that force us outright to deal with the issue at hand. Interestingly enough, such events often have repeating themes as well, such as recurring relationship patterns.

Milky