This article discusses the impact of nightmares on our lives and the anxiety they cause, and suggests ways to proactively control them. Through my own experience with nightmares and sleep disorders, I explain how I was able to intervene in my dreams to overcome my fears.
We spend one-third of our lives sleeping. During this time, which is both long and short depending on how you look at it, we have countless dreams. Sleep plays an important role in our lives, allowing our bodies and minds to recover and gain new energy. But sometimes this time of restoration can turn into a time of discomfort and fear. You’ve probably had at least one frightening and terrifying dream. We call these dreams “nightmares”. However, nightmares are more than just unpleasant. They’re more than just unpleasant, they’re a manifestation of our unconscious fears and anxieties.
The effects of nightmares don’t end with the terror of the moment. Nightmares have a profound effect on our daily lives. Most people will feel unnecessarily anxious throughout the day if they had a bad dream the night before, and will act cautiously for the rest of the day. Few of us are able to wake up from a bad dream with a sense of calm. Especially if the nightmare recurs frequently or the details are remembered very vividly, a person cannot escape the horror of the dream. Although dreams are not our reality, they can sometimes leave us with more intense emotions than waking life.
So, why do we suffer from nightmares? According to experts, nightmares are a product of stress, anxiety, or psychological conflicts. Many people find that they are more likely to have nightmares on stressful days, when they have a lot of worries. So, how can you overcome them?
Have you ever imagined that you could change your dreams to your will? It may sound a bit crazy and far-fetched, but I used to think about how great it would be if I could change my dreams to my will every time I had a nightmare. If I could make the scary situation work in my favor, the dream would no longer be a nightmare. In fact, trying to control our dreams during sleep is something we do a lot unconsciously. What if you had a dream about BLACKPINK, but your phone vibrated and woke you up at the crucial moment when you were close enough to see them? Nine times out of ten, you’d go back to sleep. This is because we need to see BLACKPINK to continue our dream. Whether you succeed or not, you’re unknowingly trying out these conditioning behaviors.
The nightmare coping methods I’m going to talk about in the next section come from this attitude of actively trying to intervene in your nightmares. When I first came across this method, I was skeptical. But the effect was much more powerful than I expected. The terror in a dream depends on how we perceive it. If we can actively transform and intervene in our dreams, instead of just passively experiencing them, they won’t bother us anymore.
Now, let’s get back to the point and talk about nightmares. So, how do we overcome them? Here’s a dream situation. It’s late at night, you’re alone in the woods, and a man with a black face, a black hat, and a mask half covering his face is chasing after you. The only thing you can do is run, looking straight ahead. Your breathing gets faster and faster, and you realize that the road in front of you is a cliff. At this point, you’re no longer sure if you’re in reality or a dream, and as you stumble backwards, you eventually fall off the cliff and wake up with a start.
This dream is a nightmare I’ve had since I was quite young. Like many children go through growing pains, I had a complex sleep disorder as a child. My condition was more severe than the average child’s, as I was plagued by nightmares of this nature on a daily basis, as well as sleepwalking, which prevented me from sleeping properly every night. I must have woken up screaming over and over again. As anyone who has suffered from nightmares knows, it can be very disturbing, even in everyday life.
When I first had the dream, I didn’t do much about it, and my parents, who were watching from the sidelines, didn’t take it seriously at first. But as time went on, they became more frequent and repetitive, and the whole family actively searched for remedies to avoid the nightmares, but nothing seemed to work. When they went to the hospital, they were told it was stress, and when they went to a Chinese medicine clinic, they were told that their child’s qi was deficient, but nothing changed. I even tried changing the direction of my bed because I was told that if my head was facing north, I would have bad dreams. But the nightmares continued with the same repertoire. It’s funny to think about now, but I once even wore an amulet because of my nightmares. At the time, I was so afraid to go to bed at night.
Up until this point, I was only thinking about how to avoid them so I wouldn’t have nightmares. But at a certain point, I changed my attitude and decided to actively intervene in my nightmares. First, I thought about why I was afraid of dreams in the first place. Years before the nightmares started, I had gotten lost and followed a strange man, and I thought maybe that fact was projected into my dreams. An intense fear of falling is a fear that still haunts me as an adult, and today I can’t even look down properly from a height of three stories. In the end, I realized that the reason I was afraid of the nightmare was because the man chasing me was a stranger and the cliff was high.
Now that I know why, I need to actively reflect my thoughts in my dreams. First, I made sure I had enough images in my head before I went to bed. I would go back to the dream scene and think about what’s wrong and what needs to change. For example, a strange man suddenly turns into a cute puppy, or a cliff turns out to be a fluffy cushion instead of a precipice. It’s not something you think about once or twice. You need to play it over and over in your head at least a dozen times. That’s as much as I can prepare. This is how I used to imagine my dreams every night before going to sleep.
But did it really work for me? Did the man who was chasing me disappear? Would the falling tree have never appeared to me? To be honest, I’m not sure I’ve completely stopped having nightmares since then. But what I can say for sure is that the level of fear was noticeably reduced, and my attitude was much different than before. I still have the occasional nightmare with the same content, but I no longer feel anxious or avoid them all day like I used to. The story of the nightmare that haunted me so much as a child ended in such a simple way. The story of how I once had a serious sleep disorder became a distant memory.
I don’t know what happened, but the day before I wrote this post, I had the scariest dream I’ve had in a long time. I woke up today with a start. One more blog post, and this time, ironically, thanks to a nightmare. I set out to change my dreams, but this method only allows me to imagine the dream flow. You can’t suddenly create a dream that doesn’t exist. Just like imagining yourself winning the lotto a hundred times isn’t going to make your ancestors suddenly appear and give you the numbers. But I think this small change could have a positive impact on the millions of people who, like me, are afraid to go to sleep because of nightmares. Be proactive about bad dreams. They’re just dreams, and we have the power to change them.
