How can I stop bad dreams and nightmares?

Why do we have bad dreams? Should we pay them attention? How can we stop them?

Let’s face it, no-one wants to experience bad dreams, whether they’re of the full-on horror variety that leave you terrified to go back to sleep, or whether they’re more of the anxious, stressful variety that disrupt your sleep and leave you feeling a lingering sense of unease.

There are ways to stop bad dreams and nightmares from recurring, and there are ways to reduce the likelihood of having bad dreams, but let’s begin with why we have bad dreams, and whether we should pay them attention before bringing in the ‘stop bad dreams’ tools.

 

Why do we have bad dreams?

By the way, this is all a matter of perspective! One person’s bad dream is another person’s curious night-time horror movie, or exciting, adrenalin-inducing cliff edge adventure, but when scary dreams disrupt your sleep, leave you feeling unsettled or anxious the next day and scared to go to sleep the next night, they are indeed in your personal ‘bad dream’ or ‘nightmare’ category.

Most bad dreams or nightmares involve fear, stress, and anxiety, and most have unresolved endings. Your dreams are the result of your sleeping brain and mind processing your conscious and unconscious experiences in a bid to make sense of those experiences and prepare you to handle similar situations in the future. Your dreams also try to resolve problems and issues, but not always successfully. When dreams are unresolved or have unsatisfactory endings, it’s because your dreaming mind has been unable to find a solution to the issue that you were grappling with in the 1-2 days before the dream.

When you are processing fear, stress, and anxiety in a dream, your body releases the same fear, stress, and anxiety hormones that it would if you were awake and experiencing fear, stress, or anxiety. So even though you are dreaming, your body, as well as your mind, is in a state of physiological fear and stress. This is why you wake up with your heart beating fast, feeling cold with goosebump skin, and feeling a sense of dread. Awake, you have the feeling that the dream actually happened, and this compounds your fear.

So, in summary, you have bad dreams because you are processing your conscious and unconscious fears, stresses, and anxieties, without finding solutions, and the bad feeling is compounded because your body and mind is drenched in the actual hormones these feelings induce.

 

Should we pay attention to bad dreams?

Bad dreams and nightmares, like all other dreams, are symbolic. It’s only when you learn how to interpret your dreams that you can understand them, relate them to your waking life, and find helpful insight you can use to move forward.

Some bad dreams may appear to be less symbolic – perhaps you dream of a friend having a serious accident, for example – and it’s natural to wake up from such a dream and think you’ve previewed an actual event, or received a warning, and this escalates the horror of your bad dream. But, rest assured, when you explore such a dream, you’ll discover what it really means about you and your life, and you’ll be able to use this insight in positive ways.

Interpreting a bad dream or nightmare can help you to understand your deeper, often unconscious, fears, stresses, and anxieties. It can help you to see what underlies those fears – perhaps your limiting beliefs about yourself or about your life, for example – and it can help you to resolve issues, find solutions to problems, shift perspective, and change limiting beliefs into more positive ones that can free you up in life.

So, in summary, it’s best to pay attention to bad dreams and nightmares by interpreting them (or seeking help from a professional dream consultant), before looking at how to stop them. If you jump straight into stopping them, you miss the opportunity to gain meaningful insight that can transform your life in wonderful ways.

There’s additional magic in interpreting a bad dream and taking action on your insight: the bad dream stops!

The issue is resolved, so the dream stops.

 

So how can I stop bad dreams and nightmares?

Apart from stopping bad dreams by interpreting them and acting on the insight you gain, as described above, here are some other ways you can stop or help prevent bad dreams:

1. Change the ending of the dream

This is a form of Dream Alchemy. When you are awake, rewrite the dream with a positive ending. This works best if you have already interpreted the dream, but there is still value in this method without interpretation. There is only one thing to bear in mind: in your rewrite, don’t kill anything off or make anything disappear. Instead, transform negative – or bad – into positive, or good.

For example, if your bad dream was about falling off a cliff, rewrite a version where you find a safe path. Or rewrite a version where you fly. If your bad dream was about finding an evil monster hiding in a cupboard, rewrite a version where you find a loving little puppy in the cupboard. Then visualise your rewrite over and over again while you are awake. Your dreaming mind will take the cue to change the dream and, even better, your unconscious mind will take the cue to find a safer path, or to face your demons and find something precious in their place.

2. Get a full night’s sleep every night

If you avoid sleep by going to bed later because you’re anxious about having more bad dreams you can make things worse for yourself. With less dreaming time to process your waking life experiences – especially your fears, anxieties, issues, feelings, emotions, and challenges – you head into the next day already ill-at-ease. Those fears compound, those issues remain unresolved, those feelings lose the opportunity to vent during a dream, those emotions go unchecked, and those challenges miss the opportunity for the deep creative problem-solving that dreams can offer.

Not only that, but the more you deprive yourself of sleep, the more likely you are to suffer REM Rebound. During a normal eight-hour sleep, you experience four or five REM (Rapid Eye Movement) periods during which you do most of your vivid dreaming. After several nights of sleep deprivation or short sleeps, those missed REM periods can all crash in bringing an avalanche of overdue dreams, most of which may be vivid and nightmarish.

Go to bed early enough to get a full eight-hour sleep. If you wake up with a bad dream, sit up in bed to do the rewrite (or visualise the rewrite), then lay back down again, telling yourself you are safe.

3. Avoid alcohol and drugs

Alcohol can repress REM sleep, leaving you bereft of healthy dreaming time. Ultimately, you’ll experience REM Rebound (see above section) with increased likelihood of bad dreams. Some medicinal drugs can induce bad dreams. Check with your doctor.

4. A note about PTSD

If you suffer with PTSD, you may experience flashback dreams that are either exactly the same as the trauma you experienced or similar to it. Here are some tips on stopping PTSD dreams.

5. A note about sleep paralysis and scary awakenings

If your bad dream has you waking up unable to move, or seeing or sensing bad energies in your bedroom, you may be experiencing sleep paralysis. Here are some tips on dealing with this.

 

So now you know! Set yourself up for good healthy sleep every night, be curious about what your dreams mean, and apply dream alchemy rewrites!

 

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