Why a nightmare?

Although nightmares can be rooted in an experience of trauma (especially repeating nightmares), often the terror and/or anxiety they produce is arranged to “wake us up.” It’s as though previous subtler attempts to get our attention have failed so the unconscious shakes us awake both literally and figuratively.

When trauma is not the cause, the difficulty for many of us is trying to figure out what to do? It’s the middle of the night. I’m wide awake. What do I do with this terrifying experience?

While trying to figure a nightmare out is perhaps the ultimate goal, any attempt that tries to explain it away can be counterproductive.

With any alarm, our first reaction is to identify what going on and if it turns out to be a false alarm, we quickly resume along our path as though nothing happened.

Nightmare’s are not false alarms. The imagery they render may not be a literal picture of a problem. In fact, it may be a wild exaggeration. That being said, the nightmare is an attempt to bring something we are unaware of to our attention. There certainly is smoke, if not fire.

So spend time with the images. It can be useful to write the dream down. This effort places value on the imagery without an attempt of the rational mind to explain anything. It’s also very helpful to employ the phrase “as if.”

Another useful response is to make a conscious commitment to pay attention for the next dream. Just letting the unconscious know you are more attentive will often moderate the imagery that follows. And as it becomes clear reading Jung’s “Seminar on Dream Analysis,” it’s in a series of dreams that the compensatory action of the unconscious begins to bring about transformation.