People who are grieving often experience horrible nightmares. As someone who has been having nightmares for almost years, of all sorts, I will try to give you some useful tips to train yourself to wake up from a nightmare.
Some repetitive nightmares can also carry a hidden meaning. Besides grief, a nightmare could be triggered by stress in general, and anxiety as well. A bad dream can occur as a result of taking certain medications, or can be a part of PTSD – post-traumatic stress disorder.
Yet, you have probably realized all that by yourself. The question is – can one train themselves to wake up from a nightmare and stop it? I say YES, and here’s what you should do to achieve that:
- Try to get aware that you are dreaming. People who have lucid dreams will know this very well. With a purpose to stop the dream from happening, you should try to remind yourself that you are sleeping – in your dream. You can do that by trying to act differently in a dream and especially focus on certain things, including: clocks, text, and signs. The clock will usually show some nonsense time number, and the text will be difficult to read. Signs may change when you look at them several times. I know this sounds weird but with time you will be able to train yourself how to behave in a dream to send signals to your brain and realize a nightmare isn’t happening in the real time.
- Blinking, shaking your head, or moving your body… The next important things after clocks, signs, and text is to try blinking, shaking your head, or moving any part of your body – yes, in a dream. Yet, at first, your body will do it in the real time as well and that is often enough for your brain to reconnect with a new activity, wake you up, and stop the nightmare.
- Use your voice. Have you realized how all dreams are somehow muted, especially nightmares? This is the same technique as the previous one, just verbal – try to say something in a dream. This will reconnect the vires in your brain, wake you up, and end a bad dream.
What to do after you wake up? We all know that nightmares can sometimes continue their story when we fall asleep again. To prevent that from happening, I would highly recommend that you get up from bed, walk around for a bit, turn the lights on, and splash your face with some water. You can drink water as well. All this will restart your brain.
With time, you will learn how to overcome nightmares – there’s one great advice that can help you with very bad nightmares that affect your entire daily mood.
Write them down, and then change the plot and the story – you should especially focus on the ending, making it beautiful.
Preventing nightmares from happening – there are a few useful things you can do with a purpose to minimize the occurrence of nightmares and bad dreams.
Avoid heavy news before going to bed, especially doom scrolling. Limit alcohol and caffeine in the evening, and try to go to bed at least at the similar time every evening.
It’s important to mention that repeated nightmares related to a traumatic experience in real life should be monitored by a mental health care professional. Trauma-focused therapy, such as imagery rehearsal therapy is very useful for this case.
