How to Cope with Nightmares

Nightmares are definitely nags -- they can interrupt your sleep, rattle your nerves and set your heart pounding. Loosing sleep and having your body tense and ready for either fight or flight is not conducive to stress management, let alone getting back to sleep.

Getting seven or eight hours of sleep a night is crucial to your overall health and natural abilities to cope with stress. A study from the University of Warwick in London has shown that not getting enough sleep could increase your chances of an early death. And, almost perversely, getting too much sleep can also be dangerous to your health.

When you have your sleep interrupted by a nightmare, it might take you a few hours to get back to sleep. In the morning, this can make you feel just as groggy as if you hadn't slept at all. If you have a powerful nightmare about an hour before you have to get up, just get up. Still try to go to sleep at the same time that night to put your body back on track.

When Waking Up From A Nightmare

There are times when you can learn a lot from your dreams, and then there are times when the dreams are just too annoying to bother with. To more successfully forget a really bad nightmare, upon waking:

• Take a very deep breath.
• Change position in the bed as soon as you can.
• Either hug a pillow, your dog or a stuffed animal to get a soft, comforting touch.
• Turn on the light -- even it's just flashing a tiny penlight into your face or turning on a watch light.
• Focus on what is happening to you at that very moment -- what do you see, hear and smell?
• If your bladder wakes up, get up to go to the bathroom.
• If you still feel spacey or unsure of where you are, eat something small, like a chocolate kiss or a finger of peanut butter. You'll come back to earth.

Riding the Nightmare

If you keep having the same nightmare over and over again, your body or your unconscious is trying to tell you something. The only way to get rid of those nightmares permanently is to NOT wake up but confront or challenge the nightmare image. How do you do this? By "waking up" in your dreams and realizing that you are dreaming. Then, you can often take charge off a situation or even change it permanently. This is called lucid dreaming. This is a skill that takes time to develop, although some people seem to be born with the ability and some others learn it enviously quickly.

You learn that you are dreaming when you notice:

• Something impossible happening -- like bald eagles setting up a nest on the moon -- that sort of thing.
• If you are trying to read and the words keep changing
• If you are trying to tell the time and the clock face is invisible, frozen or whirling.
• If you turn a TV or other appliance off and it will not go off, even when you unplug it.
• When an image that often appears in your dreams pops up. For example, if I dream of an ex boyfriend, working in retail or rooms full of model horses, that signals to me that I am dreaming.

For Those Allergic To Riding Nightmares

Lucid dreaming is a long-term skill that takes time to develop. If you prefer not to be bothered, that's okay. There are things you can do in the waking world to combat a nightmare's grip on you. The best is learning (or remembering) how to live in the moment. That's when you focus all of your awareness on the present moment. If you practice it regularly in your waking moments, you can slip into a calm meditation as soon as you wake up in order to relax enough to get back to sleep. You might even start dreaming of living in the moment.

Never be afraid of seeking professional medical help for coping with nightmares, especially if you suffer from a mental illness or recently went through a trauma such as a natural disaster or getting laid off from a good job. You won't get any extra points in life for quietly suffering from bad dreams.

Sweet dreams, everybody.

References

"Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming." Stephen LaBerge & H. Rheingold. Ballantine; 1990.

University of Warwick. "Waking Up to the Importance of Sleep." Amy McLeod. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/knowledge/health/sleep/

Stanford University. "Nightmares." Richard J. Corelli, MD. http://www.stanford.edu/~corelli/nightmares.html

Author's personal experience