Bad Dreams, Good Medicine
Have you ever woken up shaken by a bad dream? If you’re a human, you probably have. Most of the time when I ask people about their dream life, what arises for them is a dream with disturbing, scary, or deeply painful material. There’s nothing surprising about this. Your dreams are the homeland of your shadow. Dream experiences bring you into contact with whatever your ego rejects, avoids, denies, or suppresses. Since we have such an intense collective allergy to feeling our grief, pain, jealousy, shame, guilt, and fear, these tend to be the experiences that show up in our dreams the most.
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Most of the time, when folks report having bothersome nightmares, their explicit goal is to make them stop. But how? A common response from mental health clinicians is that nightmares are an unfortunate side effect of their various diagnoses/life experiences that can be managed through medication.
To me, this is a huge loss for all humans who have bad dreams. Dreams do not arise to harm the dreamer. As the majority of human cultures have known throughout history, dreams are a tremendous tool to help us metabolize, integrate, and ultimately transmute even the most painful events of our lives into opportunities for growth, healing, creativity, and wisdom. Plus, our nightmares are 100% natural, personal to our unique individual psyche, and completely free. Avoiding the material in our bad dreams is second nature, but it’s also a huge waste of therapeutic potential. We know that we can not avoid, deny, and suppress our way into an authentic sense of feeling well. The only way out of our darkest nights of the soul…is through. Your bad dreams light the way.
A big reason folks don’t use their bad dreams for healing, particularly repetitive or recurring nightmares, is because dreamers often feel that they “already know” what the dream is trying to tell them, or that the bad dreams are merely regurgitating the bad feelings they feel when they are awake.
But if knowing what our bad feelings are intellectually was enough to help them shift and heal, wouldn’t we all feel amazing all the time? It is not enough to think about our bad feelings…we have to experience them in our bodies in the present moment if we want them to move. This is where our dreams can provide enormous help. They offer 3-D experiences that precisely illuminate some of the most complex internal experiences that our consciousness has had. We can use these images as a tool to help us create a vivid understanding of our emotional landscape and tap into our somatic experience of our feelings on a deep, intuitive level. It is from there that we begin the healing process.
Ultimately, the most common reason that we don’t utilize our bad dreams for healing is that the material we find in them is…scary. Truly, there is no way to get around this. It is scary to sit with difficult feelings. It is scary, and potentially risky to revisit the most painful or difficult experiences in our lives. Perhaps scariest of all, our ego knows that when we do this, we court transformation in our lives. We can cower, deny, suppress, or dismiss our fears, or we can turn towards them—the choice is ours.
We find ourselves in times of rapid, bewildering shifts and changes all around us. If we choose to focus on it, we can find new things to fear or worry about each and everyday. But there is another way to harness these intense energies of transformation: to push the scales to a world, society, and culture rooted in love, reciprocity, and compassion. To get there, we need strength and courage. There is no better tool I know of than our nightmares to teach us this. It’s simple: if we don’t deeply know what we fear, how can we ever develop courage in our hearts? Each and every one of our nightmares is an invitation and opportunity for courage.
So if you are tired of your nightmares haunting you night after night and you’re ready to approach your dreams in a way that will allow them to guide you towards profound growth and healing—join me! I’ll be providing even more in-depth techniques, tools, and approaches to help you harvest the deep, intrinsic medicine that arrives in your dreams each night in an upcoming LIVE workshop April 10th. I would love to see you there.