Making Friends with Your Nightmares: Why You Should Turn Toward Your Most Distressing Dreams

I am one of those fortunate people who very rarely experiences nightmares, but I had a big one very recently.  Most of us have occasional nightmares with familiar themes like being chased, attacked, falling from great heights or being faced with a final exam we didn’t study for.

These are normal, and indications of higher stress levels and/or something in our life that wants our attention.  Of greater concern, roughly one in 20 people suffer from frequent and distressing dreams that make going to sleep an unwelcome and even terrifying proposition.  

If I said, all dreams are ultimately good dreams, you may not believe me, but stay tuned.

My recent nightmare started with me standing on a high rock looking for a way down, and seeing that all paths were steep and treacherous.  Then the rock below my feet began to split, leaving a long deep crack that seemed to destabilize the entire crust of the earth I was standing on.

I stood waiting, not knowing what would happen next, but feeling an imminent earthquake or landslide of massive proportions.  The feeling in my body was strong enough to startle me out of sleep, the very definition of a nightmare.

What Was My Dream Trying To Tell Me?

I have since spent time with this dream.  I work with dreams for a living and teach other therapists how to do so, as well.  My dream partner and I regularly meet to delve into our dream lives.  She helped tend this dream, which has to do with the war in Ukraine and the deep upset and destabilization that this has caused throughout the world.

I have both Ukrainian and Russian heritage, and can feel the split within me going back to my ancestors and forward to extended family members still living in Ukraine.

The dream gave me an image for my distress, an opportunity to share in the collective concern, as well as the comfort of communing with others who are impacted by the war. It captured my helpless feeling and prompted me to offer support through a local church delivering aid to Ukraine.

The dream gave me the means to feel and express difficult feelings and galvanized me into taking some form of action. Since then, the ‘alone and helpless’ feeling from the dream has dissipated.

This is a small example. Those in the war itself will have much bigger dreams marked with trauma that is not so easy to settle. But in my work with the nightmares of refugees (Ellis, 2016), I have found ways to help with even the worst dreams – those that come after trauma, as one of the main symptoms of posttraumatic stress injury.

These dreams tend to repeat and depict worst events the dreamer has experienced, cruel reminders of their worst terrors.  

How is this kind of dream activity in any way adaptive?  

And can these nightmares actually serve us?

My decades as a trauma therapist have shown me that traumatic experiences settle in the body, and rarely go away by themselves. Instead they surface in pervasive feelings of threat, irritability, addiction, shame… and a tendency to avoid all feeling because opening one’s heart exposes them to a world of pain. Better to feel nothing than to face hard feelings and horrific memories.

A Polish nightmare researcher found that even those who had survived the concentration camp horrors at Auschwitz had dreams that were ultimately healing. Wojciech Owczarski studied the dreams and recovery trajectory of former Polish prisoners and found that their dreams of the holocaust aided in their trauma recovery and gave them a narrative for the ‘unspeakable’ horror they experienced.

With time, some dreams began to include current and hopeful content. For example, a man who survived Auschwitz began to dream that he was back in the prison camp, but his new wife was there with him, along with a sense that they would survive.

Such dreams bring up unbearable memories, so they can be woven into the fabric of everyday life, dissipating their charge.

In this way, nightmare help us process our traumatic memories.

Can Nightmares Be Treated?

Nightmare researchers have found many ways to help reduce the frequency and distress caused by nightmares, simple methods that work quickly yet are vastly underutilized by clinicians and nightmare sufferers alike.

I have made it my mission to change this by treating nightmares, training clinicians in working with distressing dreams, and developing and continuing to research methods of nightmare treatment.

It seems that trauma, war, disease and disaster are collective features of this human life. However, our bodies are also equipped with the means to metabolize the fear and sadness that comes along with life’s hardships.

Our dreams are part of this healing mechanism, offering images we can express and share, images that we can imagine forward to a better place, images that have energy within them for transforming pain.

We all have a tendency to avoid our hurt places, but this leaves them frozen in time, and like a ticking bomb that can go off whenever we are met with direct reminders or stress that overloads our defense systems.

What Can You Do About Your Nightmares?

My advice to anyone who experiences nightmares is to turn toward them and inquire into what they are asking of you. Many of our horrific dreams contain important information that is not related to violence or trauma; instead they are a metaphor with a message.

For example, when my daughter was away at university, she dreamt that she was hacking a woman to pieces and trying to hide the blood mess. Deeply disturbed by this, she called me, and our conversation turned to the question about what it meant to be divided or chopped into pieces.

Shut in a small apartment during the cold Montreal winter, she realized that her nature-loving self had been left behind, and she was suffering greatly from this loss of an essential aspect of herself. This realization made sense of the dream and prompted her to make changes that included braving the cold, grabbing her skate skis and getting outside more often.

Most nightmares are in this category – attention-getting, helpful and not of clinical concern. However, in 2-5 % of cases, nightmares are trauma-related, frequent and deeply distressing, and in these cases, it’s all the more important to pay attention to the dreams.

Frequent nightmares are robustly linked to post-traumatic stress, other forms of mental illness and an increased risk of suicide. Don’t go it alone, but get professional help if your nightmares are extreme and visit often. But remember that you have every reason to remain hopeful.

Consider these examples:

• A woman who fled the conflict in Congo fearing for her life had a decade of recurring dreams of being captured and questioned, so frozen in terror she couldn’t speak. In the dreamwork, she dreamt this forward and found her voice, her body unthawed and she could now really believe she had escaped. After that, her nightmares stopped.

• A man who endured years of early sexual abuse trauma had dreams of faceless pursuers. When working with these dreams, combined with deep trauma therapy, he was able to turn and see the face of his demons, call them out on their unforgivable transgressions, and even make peace.
  
  This settled inside as a sense of safety he had not known in this life. And the dreams themselves changed completely as well.

Sometimes the path to a sense of inner safety and peace is short, and other times, it can take years. This depends on the nature and time frame of the traumas one has experienced. The dreams that come are reminders and point the way forward. Like a crowd of sorrows, welcome and entertain them all, and they in turn, will become your greatest allies.

References:

Owczarski, W. (2018). Adaptive nightmares of Holocaust survivors: The Auschwitz camp in the former inmates’ dreams. Dreaming, 28(4), 287–302. https://doi.org/10.1037/drm0000086