Understanding Your Nightmares

Nightmares are dreams that stir up intense negative emotions, which can make them more difficult to interpret. You have nightmares when something in your life demands your immediate attention and requires resolution. They can be a result of stress, fears and insecurities (both conscious and unconscious), general unhappiness and emotional turmoil, or traumatic events in your life. People suffering from Post Traumatic Stress often relive the traumatic event(s) in their dreams and can be plagued with persistent nightmares. Whatever the cause of the nightmare, the simple message is that you need to deal with something now before it becomes a much bigger problem.

In order to understand the real message of your nightmare, you need to separate yourself from the emotional reaction and consider all the symbols and concepts in your dream from an objective standpoint. (Most of the time you need to consider your emotional reactions when interpreting your dreams, but with nightmares the emotional reaction can overshadow the true meaning of the dream.) First consider the overall theme of your nightmare, some common examples are: betrayal, abandonment, loss, violence, and chaos. Also carefully consider all the situations in your present life that could be a source of stress, fear, insecurity or turmoil--is it possible that your nightmare represents any of these real situations? Nightmares that seem to be a realistic portrayal of your worst fears don't necessarily mean that your fears are going to come to pass in your near future! It means you're feeling particularly vulnerable and your fear or sense of insecurity requires your attention now before it gets out of hand and causes real problems in your waking life.

You might be confused about the meaning of your nightmare because of the people present in your dream. Sometimes a nightmare involves specific people in your life but the message may not relate to them or your relationship with them at all. For example, a nightmare about your mother dying could be connected to a fear of losing someone you care deeply about rather than your mother specifically.

Sometimes nightmares convey messages about things you are passionately concerned about, even if the events of the dream do not directly relate to your everyday life. People who have very passionate opinions about current events, war, human rights, animal rights, etc can experience nightmares about these topics. These types of nightmares are often messages that you should express your opinions more or even get involved in activism. These nightmares are usually quite specific in that they contain details that are relevant to the issue you're concerned about--a nightmare about the war in Iraq can mean you're being encouraged to express your political opinions more, while a dream about war in general often relates to fears of chaos, loss of control, etc.

I hope you will be able to decipher the important lessons of your nightmares so you can get on with dreaming much sweeter dreams!

~*~Monica Who~*~