The clear take home is that a nightmare is simply a message from your subconscious or whatever to address some aspect of your life and to take it seriously. I think that is actually true although I cannot seriously vouch for all that.
The
only memorable nightmare I ever had was to wake up thinking that is
had to write an exam. This went on long after the need had passed.
Those are obviously stress dreams.
It is
certainly important to at least pay attention and use them as a tool
to understand any underlying problem.
Nightmares
July 31, 2014
Jeremy Taylor,
Waking Times
Whenever any dream is remembered, it is an indication that the waking mind has a creative, transformative role to play in the evolution of whatever issue the dream is presenting. For millions of years, the ability to pay immediate and focused attention to nasty, threatening stuff has been a primary survival test. The creatures who pay effective attention to threats tend to survive, and the ones who don’t tend not to survive. In this way, we have been shaped by natural selection to be inherently predisposed to pay attention to ugly, scary, and menacing experiences.
Why Nightmares Are
Good
As a consequence, when
the deep source within (from which all dreams spring, spontaneously
and unbidden) has potentially important information to convey to the
waking consciousness, it is very likely to dress that material up in
the form of a “nightmare,” simply to get our attention. This
leads to one of the most ironic general principles of dream work: the
more horrifying and distressing the dream experience, the greater the
potential gift of increased understanding and creative energy the
dream has to offer.
We usually call such
dreams “nightmares.” The generic message of any
nightmare is: Wake up. Pay attention. There is a survival issue being
brought to your attention here! Sometimes the “survival issues”
raised by nightmares are related to actual physical health. Most
often, however, the nightmare is trying to draw attention to
questions of emotional and spiritual authenticity in the dreamer’s
life.
In my experience, all
dreams (and particularly nightmares) come in the service of health
and wholeness. This means that no dream, no matter how
distressing or menacing, ever came to anyone to say, “Nyah, nyah,
you’ve got these problems and you can’t do anything about them!”
The very fact that a dream is remembered in the first place means
that the dreamer actually has at his or her disposal all the courage,
creativity, strength, and wisdom necessary to respond creatively and
transformatively to even the worst “problem” that the dream
presents. (If the dreamer were not in possession of all the energies
required for positive, creative, transformative response, the dream
would simply not be remembered.) This is true not only at the level
of individual, psychospiritual health and wholeness, but at the level
of world society, culture, and collective human struggle as well.
Ironically, for this
reason I take heart every time I have (or hear about) a dream that
involves large, planet-wide problems like destruction of the
environment, plague, military conflict, or other massive disruption
of society. The fact that we remember such dreams suggests that we
are able to respond creatively and effectively to these problems, in
the same fashion that dreams addressing seemingly “insoluble”
personal problems always indicate our ability to deal with those
problems. Nightmares may also provide symbolic suggestions and
specific creative inspirations, provided we have the wit and wisdom
to pay attention.
Historical Nightmares
However, in some cases the specific creative possibilities
proposed by the dream are even more challenging than our immediate
experience of the problems themselves. Among these challenging dreams
are the really terrible nightmares I call “worst case dreams.”
Hindu and Buddhist dream workers have understood for
centuries that these worst case dreams are deeply associated with the
dreamer’s effective spiritual development.
It is interesting
to note that John Newton, the composer of the hymn “Amazing Grace,”
was converted to Christianity and transformed into an ardent
antislavery activist by just such a nightmare: He dreamed of seeing
“all of Europe consumed in a great raging fire” while he was the
captain of a slave ship.
Dreams and Spiritual
Development
One reason why such
distressing dream experiences regularly come to people who are deeply
engaged in their own spiritual development, or those working in the
world to relieve the sufferings of others, is that the only place
where evil can truly be faced and overcome is within. This means that
people who are sincerely engaged in trying to make the world a better
place must face and overcome this order of evil if they are to
succeed. The more sincere and effective one’s spiritual development
and one’s reconciling work in the world, the more likely it is that
one will have worst case dreams of this archetypal order.
In that sense, the
worst case dreams are little “training films” for the spiritual
warrior. Another way of looking at such dreams is that they are
“rescue missions” undertaken by the dreaming psyche in the
as-yet-unredeemed depths of the archetypal Shadow and the Inchoate
Potential in the collective unconscious.
The Magic Mirror that
Never Lies
Initially, it always
seems as though the most difficult task faced by the dreamer is to
look into the “magic mirror that never lies” and take more
responsibility for the symbolic reflections of our weaknesses and
failures. However, over time, it becomes clear that an even more
challenging task is to acknowledge the size and scope of our creative
gifts and our ability to transform ourselves and our world. The worst
case dream calls upon the dreamer not only to see and accept the
depths of depravity that reside in every human psyche, but even more
importantly, to become more conscious of and responsible for our
ability to face, overcome, and give transformative, creative, and
spiritual expression to those archetypal shadow energies.
About the Author
Reverend Dr. Jeremy
Taylor (USA) resides in California and works and teaches around the
world. He is one of the original founders, and past president of the
International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD) and is the
author of several well-respected books on dreams and dream work. He
is a pioneer in the field of group projective dream work, and has
blogged on dreams for Psychology Today magazine.
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