Nightmares can be a difficult and even debilitating experience but many people don’t realize that nightmares are one of the most powerful healing tools available to everyone on the planet. Often, we’re told from a young age to shake off our nightmares, get over them, and not to give them much attention. We’re taught to view them as an inconvenience. This couldn’t be further from the truth and I’ve spent much of my life learning about their wisdom while healing along the way. As a dream and nightmare educator I help individuals across the globe reframe their relationship with nightmares, understand their causes, and teach them how to use the information they uncover as a tool for personal evolution.
Leading psychological theories suggest that dreams and nightmares are a necessary function of development. They help us process our life’s experiences, assist in memory formation and emotional regulation, work through problem solving or “what-if” scenarios, and connect us with our soul’s innate self-knowledge and the greater cosmos. We cannot progress through life without the psychological, emotional, and spiritual background work of our dreamtime experiences.
Image by Peter Linforth from Pixabay
Like dreams, nightmares are an exploration of our internal conversation, specifically highlighting our fears and difficult moments. They show us exactly where dissonance exists within us, even when we’re in conscious denial. This makes them a powerful ally and tool for identifying the parts of ourselves that need healing.
I first began to notice the powerful wisdom of nightmares after returning from a deployment to Afghanistan in 2015. My nightmares had increased in frequency once I returned to the States and I’d regularly wake in a panic to the echoes of mortar fire, sometimes even feeling the dark presence of some unseen demon-like figure in an episode of sleep paralysis. In the months that followed, those terrifying dreamtime experiences began to affect my friendships, drove me towards alcoholism, and even ate away at my will to live. The underlying narrative permeating the Marine Corps did little to assist me with its unspoken rule that if you hadn’t endured combat then you hadn’t earned the right to experience PTSD. I tried to shove the nightmares down and carry on like nothing had happened even though I knew I needed help. Unwilling (at the time) to seek out therapy and not knowing what else to do, I began to recall and record my nightmares.
A year later I completed my enlistment and decided to re-enter the civilian world, moving from Fort Meade, Maryland to Seattle, Washington for a new job. Despite the reduction in military-related stress, my nightmares amplified considerably and began to carve away at a dark hole that had formed in my heart space. My suffering entered new territory and I felt as though my very lifeforce was being siphoned away. In response, my nightmares had developed a new recurring theme that always ended with me scrambling across the deck of an old ship to escape a terrifying creature I called the Leviathan. This monster was the ruler of my nightmare realm but while I was terrified of its recurring presence, I somehow knew that the creature was trying to help me.
Finally, I made the decision to seek professional help and began to work with a psychological therapist. I was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), major depressive disorder (MDD), anxiety with frequent panic attacks (often 3-4 times per week), and suicidal ideation. I had never before acknowledged the depths of my mental and emotional anguish but in bringing these diagnoses to light and admitting to myself that I was unwell I began to do the work.
It was through these sessions that I realized my recurring “Creature-in-the-Depths” nightmare felt eerily identical to the feelings, emotions, and memories of the very real military and childhood traumas that were coming to the surface in therapy. I focused even more effort on the recall, recording, and observation of my nightmares and, over time, realized that the monsters and demons in my dreamspace were indeed trying to help me. They had been trying to show me what, exactly, I had been fearing since I was six years old.
My nightmares were the parts of myself and my history that I was terrified of acknowledging.
In my recurring “Creature-in-the-Depths” nightmare the Leviathan always circled menacingly in the waters below the ship. We were always in the middle of a terrible storm and I would hang over the railing to see its undulating body circling below before being struck with paralyzing fear. Terror sank in that we would capsize and the Leviathan would devour me.
As I worked with this nightmare I began to understand it. Water imagery, in almost every culture on the planet, has ties to the concept of emotion.
Calm waters are likened to feeling zen, turbulent waters are likened to emotional ups and downs, and I realized that the storm in my nightmares represented the chaotic state of the emotions I had been forcing down for years. The storm was always trying to throw me off the ship and into the clutches of the Leviathan–I was trying to show myself that I needed to dive into the well of stored emotions and meet my fears head on. I needed to see my Leviathan up close and acknowledge that it existed in order to make peace with the monster once and for all.
For its part, the Leviathan represented my fear of change and acknowledgment. Serpent symbolism is often tied to change or the concept of shedding skin and evolving. But I was terrified of acknowledging the changes I knew I needed to make because they involved releasing people from my life, people who were my family, people who had caused me immense suffering, and I didn’t want to see what they had done to me.
I wanted to pretend that I’d had a perfect childhood with no trials or traumas beyond the occasional illness or fight with my siblings over our Star Wars action figures. But at my core I not only wanted to heal, I knew that I needed to in order to continue to live. So, one day, my nightmares encouraged me to acknowledge my experiences and share them with my therapist.
The first step in every healing experience is the simple acknowledgement that something needs healing. Our nightmares exist to help us initiate healing experiences by showing us what needs to be seen or worked with.
Over the following years my life shifted and changed in ways I could have never predicted. I moved to Minnesota, continued my inner work with a new psychological therapist, and we actively began using the information of my nightmares to shape our therapy sessions. I would wake from a nightmare, recall, record, and interpret the symbolism, focusing heavily on the emotions and memories that arose as a result and would then take my findings to my next session where we would explore that particular memory or emotion as it had occurred in my waking life.
In this way, my nightmares guided me through each individual memory and difficult moment that needed healing in the order that I needed to heal it. Once we had worked with and progressed through one memory my nightmares would shift and change, pointing out the next memory or emotion, and so on and so forth.
The more I acknowledged my nightmares and used their wisdom to face my inner fears, the more I healed and stepped into a life without my self-imposed suffering.
Today, I find myself on the other side of the healing experience. I no longer suffer from MDD, the symptoms of my C-PTSD are well-managed, and I’ve only had two panic attacks in the last year and a half! But most of all, I made the conscious decision to continue to live no matter what, leaving any lingering thoughts of suicide far behind.
I have healed in every way possible and I continue to heal in ways I could have never imagined. All of this I attribute to the ever-present wisdom of my nightmares, the acknowledgement of my fears, and a desire to heal and change for the better.
If you’d like to learn more about your nightmares and their healing wisdom, my new book is designed to help. How to Heal Your Nightmares is a memoir and guide for facing your nighttime monsters and using their wisdom to heal your life. And you can find even more on dream and nightmare wisdom, self-interpretation, connecting with your unique internal wisdom, or cosmic activities like out-of-body experiences on my website, megbartlett.com.
Know This: YOU are your own greatest catalyst for change. It’s time to acknowledge your nightmares, look your fears in the eye, and move forward one step at a time. Your nightmares are here to help.
