Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Clare R. Johnson, PhD, author of Llewellyn’s Complete Book of Lucid Dreaming, The Art of Lucid Dreaming, and the new The Art of Transforming Nightmares.
Nightmares can be terrifying, but astonishingly, they can also be opportunities for deep healing and spiritual progression.
There are many swift and practical ways of working with stressful dreams or nightmares to unwrap any gifts they have for us.
What would you do if you had a nightmare like this one?
In a parking lot, I see an old man with a wrinkled, ghostly white face. He scares me. I sense he is going to rape me. I yell at him to go away. I struggle to say something but no sound comes out. He comes in to attack, his hand reaching for my throat. I try to scream. Then I wake up in total panic and fear.
There are so many different possible responses to nightmares when we re-enter them imaginatively. We can protect ourselves within an egg of light, or bring powerful allies into the nightmare scene with us. We might choose to send love and light to threatening dream figures, or give them a gift.
Let’s look at a beautiful and healing nightmare solution that Kristen created after having the nightmare described above. Wisely, she protects herself so that she feels safe before she faces her nightmare.
“Awake in bed now, I feel angry about being attacked in my dream. I decide to re-enter the dream and find the old man. I start by going into my imagination and forming a bubble around me which I fill in with all the things I feel supported by: allies, objects, and symbols.
Then I’m back in the dream again and I see the creepy ghost man still in the parking lot. I begin to move in as if I’m going to destroy him when I hear a voice saying, ‘Remember to do it with love!’
As I approach him, I see a look of shock on his face. Then I direct a bridge from my heart towards him. I tell him I am a being of light and invite him to step into love.
He begins to go from a ghostly ashen colour to white, then transparent, until he turns to dust and disappears all together. Bam!
When I woke up, I felt an incredible surge of energy and couldn’t believe how easy it was to transform this terrifying experience. It felt like I finally learned how to take my power back.
I took this sense of empowerment into my waking life from that day on. It was one of the most powerful dreams I have had.”
When we encounter the right nightmare solution, either in our imagination, or in the dream state, it resonates within us on an incredibly deep level. This can be very therapeutic, enabling us to release unhelpful psychological patterns and behaviours that have been holding us back.
The empowerment of the dreamwork remains with us, and we notice positive changes in our waking lives. It can be so simple and so quick to make real changes!
You can find more about this nightmare transformation practice in my new book, The Art of Transforming Nightmares, which aims to empower dreamers by giving them practical tools to resolve nightmares and other disturbing sleep experiences in healing ways.
Our thanks to Clare for her guest post! For more from Clare R. Johnson, PhD, read her article, “3 Common Nightmares & What They Mean.”
