What Happens When You Wake Up in a Nightmare?
In the winter of 2019, my self-hate and anxiety were reaching an all-time high, and with it, my nightmares.
Every night I fell asleep and dreaming of being tortured, of falling to my death and any other traumatic event my brain could muster up. My subconscious was screaming at me, wanting to be heard and expressing itself in the only way it knew how.
You see, our subconscious is filled with our past traumas, with our limiting beliefs, and anything we have repressed. What I didn’t understand at the time was my subconscious was trying to bring attention to the things I didn’t want to face and the only way it could do that was through its own language.
The subconscious communicates through a metaphorical language. Mine thought that the metaphor for me not facing my insecurities and instead lingering in my self-hate would be to have a dream where my fingers are being cut off with a pizza slicer. It's a bit extreme if you ask me but it got its point across.
Now that I was having these horrible nightmares every night I began to start revaluating my current vibrational state. I was miserable and the nightmares were only making me more depressed and anxious. It had been going on like this for a few months and since I was so used to the nightmares I began to realize I was in them as they happened.
At first, as soon as I realized I was dreaming I would immediately try to force myself to wake up. Which led to something much worse.
False awakenings are when you genuenly belive you have woken up, you are in your bed, everything seems real but after a few minutes or seconds you realize it is still a dream. This will usually cause the dreamer to panic and then enduce a nightmare. It is also important to remember you can have multiple false awkening in the same night. This means over and over again you will be waking up tothe same nightmare.
Now this all sounds horrible, and it was don’t get me wrong but there is an upside. Once I started to realize I couln’t escape the nightmares I was faced with every night I began embrace them.
The first part of my embracement meant that I saw the nightmares as a challenge. One night I would be getting attacked by sharks in a dark ocean and the next kidnapped by a terrfiying man. Instead of being afraid I began to fight back, I would swim into the dark water and kick the shark, I would outsmart the man and escape. None the less even if my nights were getting easier it still wasn’t the most enjoyable way to spend my nights so I looked into dream work even more.
I learned that everything in your dreams is especially you. That demon is some part of you and instead of fighting it, why not show it love?
…because they try to stab you?
That is true but one night I did it anyway and this is what happened.
I was talking to a dream character about how I wanted money and I would be rich. My subconcious didn’t like this since I have many limiting beliefs about money and the man squared up to me and started trying to hit me. He became more and more agressive and as I ran away I could feel the violence pouring out of him and knew he wanted to kill me.
At this point I was used to my dreams being nightmares so I didn’t have much to loose so I turned around and went to him. At first it hurt when I touched him and I instantly regreted what I had done, nothing was changing but I had already commited to testing the theory so I closed my eyes and hugged him tighter.
After a few seconds of pain and fear it began to shrink. When I opened my eyes the aggressive man had turned into a little boy. I let go of him and he simply walked away from me.
Now there are many ways to interpret this but I’ll share my take on it. All these limiting beliefs we have about our self and the majority of our insecurities are formed during childhoood. Your subconcious wont show you a scared child that believes they will never have money because they lacked financial stablilty growing up but it will show you what that manifests into if left ignored.
My advice to you is to look at your nightmares as a cry for help from yourself to yourself. Ask yourself what could possibly be bringing out these negative emotions and if you can, face them. If you keep running the monsters will keep following you, so give them a hug instead.
