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Feel confused or don't know the answer? Maybe you should sleep on it
What to do, what to do, what to do??? We’ve all had the experience, where some issue just doesn’t seem clear to us, some decision just seems impossible to make, some problem just seems too difficult to solve. We may have wrestled with the issue in our our minds, maybe tried writing a list of pros and cons, perhaps spoken to friends, family or experts. And yet some how the way forward still isn’t clear. We may feel torn, anxious or just at a dead end. So, what to do?
It may seem like a meaningless cliche, but the advice to “sleep on it” is not as useless as it may at first seem. In our sleep our subconscious mind takes over. It is the role of this part of our mind to make meaning, to make sense of things. This part of mind, freed from the normal waking constraints of annoying things like logic, laws and social convention, can also be our most creative. We know our minds in this state ignore all the usual rules and regulations, or else how else could we fly or breathe underwater, and why else would we turn up to class naked or become another person as we do in our dreams? It is precisely this kind of free thinking that can solve problems for us.
But dreams aren’t simply random creative ideas, dreams are the way our subconscious attempts to resolve conflict. If there is something in our lives that is not working, if we hate our job or don’t know how to confront our parents with our true feelings, dreams will try and work it out for us. The trick is to recognise the answers when they come.
This can be difficult when we have not even admitted to ourselves or recognised exactly what our issue or concern is. But it is much easier when we know what the problem is, but we just don’t know the answer. We can actively look for our answers in our dreams. There are some tricks and techniques we can use to help tis process be more effective:
- Get as much advice, or do as much research as you can while awake about whatever the particular question of concern is. This is like feeding our minds. It doesn’t matter if we don’t remember it all or process it consciously, the information still goes into our minds, and when are asleep our subconscious can take over, looking for connections we may have missed, drawing conclusions we couldn’t grasp while awake.
- Think about the problem or question just as you go to sleep. Write it down, draw it or even say it out loud. Stating the problem clearly makes it easier to understand the answer. Give a message to your own subconscious, tell yourself what you need to know and repeat this silently in your mind as you fall asleep. This can trigger the subconscious to start working on that problem straight away. It knows where to focus and will take up where you left off when you were awake.
- Think about the question you had as soon as you wake up. Write down any fragments or images or words that come into your mind, however fleeting and irrelevant they may seem. Take time to try and remember you dreams clearly, and record it in as much detail as possible.
- Persist and persist! If the answer does not come after one night, do not give up! Give it time, let your subconscious grapple with all the complexity, let it also try to formulate an answer in a way that in your waking state will make sense to you. This kind of thinking is a skill, like any other, that requires time and practice to master.
Our subconscious mind may find creative solutions our waking mind can't see
But the rewards are well worth it. Scientific breakthroughs, ideas for great works of art and literature, mathematical equations – all have come to people who cultivated their dreams to help them understand and resolve waking life issues (see “Famous Dreams” post). But more simple, and yet more profound breakthroughs can happen for all of us on a very personal level. It might be whether to leave our job, whether this person is the right one to marry, or how to tell someone that significant secret we have been harbouring. Whatever it is, if we feel lost, confused, and don’t know which way to turn, we can always find support and guidance by looking within, by listening to the voice inside of us, through the special language of our dreams. We would all do well to heed the advice, and “sleep on it”
Dreams can take us to amazing new places in our imaginations
Want to improve the vividness, the colour, the interest and excitement of your dreams, and even make them lucid, so you know when you are dreaming? With dreams, like so many other areas of life, it can be a case of what you get out depends very much on what you put in. The subconscious responds well to all our senses, so by enriching our lives, we can expect to enrich our dreams equally. We can effectively plant the seeds of what we want to dream of by focusing on the chosen thing through-out the day, and especially right before bed. We can try to focus on a specific thing, or simply open our minds up and see how far and wide we can reach and to what lengths our imagination can go.
To create more vivid or colourful dreams, we can try looking at art, childrens’ books
How can you feed your imagination to help your dreams fly?
with bright illustrations, watching films with inspiring cinematography, or even magazines with images that get our minds going. Fantasy books are particularly good, as are fashion, costumes,nature (try bizarre deep sea creatures, tropical birds or insects to get your mind going.) Listening to music, focusing on the sounds of individual instruments, bells, wind chimes, the sounds of nature can all help us notice sounds in our dreams. The same goes for the other senses – by touching things and focusing on their texture we can enhance our tactile dreams, although smell and taste can take a concerted effort to start noticing in dreams. But it is well worth the effort when we start smelling beautiful flowers, or tasting delicious nighttime feasts without even waking up!
The key is to stimulate our imaginations. Of course the best thing is always to go to new places, try new things and meet new people, but where we can’t do that, our minds can take us on trips to even more amazing places. If we feed our minds with images, music and words, it is like fertiliser that can help our dreams sprout into fascinating new blooms, and surprise us with the capabilities of our own mind. If we feed out heads, we can be rewarded with an imagination that grows wild and free.
It is quite distressing that often when we have a nightmare, it doesn’t occur in isolation, but recurrs with a frightening persistence. As if having one nightmare wasn’t bad enough, but to have them frequently! It just doesn’t seem fair! But it makes more sense when you realise why you are having these bad dreams. When something is not quite right in our life, or in our mind, there is some level of us that wants to put things right. This is our subconscious. While consciously we may not want to admit that something is not right, because that would mean facing up to it, and that might mean getting hurt, humiliated, risking shame or a sense of failure, our subconscious refuses to let us forget, and will keep trying to send a message to our conscious mind to do something about it. It will keep shouting and shouting until it is heard. One of the strongest ways for our subconscious to make us pay attention to it is by giving us nightmares. These images are so intense and so startling that we can’t ignore them.
The sad thing for us Westerners is that we live in a society that does not in general place a great deal of value on dreaming, so we are not encouraged to value them, to discuss them, or to learn how to work with them. When this means we miss out on the opportunities for growth and delight dreams can give us, this is a shame, but when it means we can’t manage our own nightmares, it is a far more serious affair. As we grow into adults our dreams should mature with us. As we become more skillful, balanced and wise with years, so too should we dream in a more balanced and rewarding manner. But studies show that in Western society the dreams of anxious adults do not differ much from those of children. We still feel anxious and afraid, we are still pursued – maybe not by a big hairy monster as child would be, but perhaps by a vicious knife wielding bandit, and we all still dream of being attacked by wild animals. As adults we differ hardly at all from children in our response to these threats as well – we flee, we run, we get stuck, we are eaten, hurt, trapped. In short, we remain victims.
To stop having adult nightmares or bad dreams, we need to face up to what we are afraid of, we need to honestly admit to ourselves what is not working in our lives, we need to really grow up. It is hard. Our society does not encourage talking about our fears, it judges perceptions of failure, and we don’t teach our children the skills they need to work on their own inner selves so they can mature into self-aware adults. So the only thing we can do is start learning now.
We can learn how to overcome our fears, even in our dreams
Facing a scary threat in a dream can be a very difficult thing to initiate. This is especially so if we aren’t practised and confident with working with our dreams! That is why confronting the thing in waking life is often an easier way to start. Try imagining your dream when you are awake. Sit somewhere comfortable where you won’t be disturbed, and play the dream through your mind like a movie. Remember, you are the director of your dream, so tell yourself you don’t like the ending, and imagine a new one for yourself.
Another useful method you can adopt while awake that may have a carry over effect to helping deal with nightmares, is to actually do in waking life what you can’t do, or what you need to do, in your bad dreams. This often means learning a new skill, which can be confronting, difficult, frustrating or embarrassing at first, but the commensurate feelings of ease, satisfaction, confidence and pride that you should feel upon mastery will make it well worth the effort. Nightmares of sharks? Try swimming with them in a safe tank. Have a nightmare you are lost and can’t read a map? Try learning orienteering, how to read a map and use a compass. Have a nightmare someone is hurt and bleeding, and you can’t help? Go on a First Aid course and learn how to treat wounds. It may sound simple, and even silly, but actions such as these send a clear message back to our subconscious – it lets our deeper self know we have heard the message, we are listening and we care enough to do something about it. That is a very strong message indeed. It can even be enough to stop our subconscious from shouting so insistently at us, and go back to a normal tone, breaking the repetitive cycle of bad dreams. At the very least, actions such as these give our mind an alternative to work with. Instead of thinking of sharks as something that always eat us, when you have been with them safely your mind now has a clear, conscious (and no doubt very emotion charged!) image of you being with sharks and them not eating you. In fact the more emotion charged these images are, the deeper they are likely to penetrate our mind, and the stronger and more effective they can be in helping us imagine a new and happier outcome. The greater the fear, the greater our exultation can be on overcoming it.
Tomorrow, looking at a special kind of nightmare…
The first step in making nightmares go away is to face up to our fears
Firstly, let me apologise to my regular readers for my absence! I have been travelling and have not had regular access to the Internet, but I am back now so stay tuned for many more interesting installments on dreams and how we can work with them! If there is a particular kind of dream, dream symbol, or process for working with dreams you would like to know more about, please leave a comment and I will do my best to address them.
So now I think it is about time we started looking at some of the more disturbing aspects of dreaming. Until we are able to understand and work with nightmares, there will always be a major obstacle for us to access the real value and opportunities that dreaming can provide. Fear of dreaming can paralyse us in our internal explorations, but it is these very nightmares we must learn to deal with to move onto the next stage in our dreaming life, and indeed our personal development.
The main thing to remember about nightmares is the same as most other dreams. All the things you are afraid of in your dreams are really only parts of your self. If you are being chased by a monster or wild animal, it is only are part of yourself you are running from. If something or someone is attacking you, it is only a part of you attacking yourself.
Knowing this does not necesarilly make the nightmares go away, but it does give us clues as to how we can make that happen. The simple answer is, we must learn to face our what we are afraid of. We must confront our demons. As you get ready to go to sleep, prepare yourself mentally to face your attacker. Remember it can’t really hurt you, the fear comes from not wanting to recognise what is really going on. In the first nights it may be hard to do, but persist. With time you should be able to stand up to what it is that scares you. In the early days you may also find that even though you face up to whatever it is that scares you, when you do it still catches you, or eats you, or whatever. That is okay. This is still progress. The important thing is not to stop now – you have just proved that you can change something in your dream by facing up to the scary thing instead of running. This is a major achievement.
As you keep exerting your conscious control to make your dreams change for the better, eventually you will find yourself winning in these situations. You may kill the creature, you may transform it into something harmless or laughable, you may put it to sleep or feed it so much food it can’t move. All these things are sure signs the nightmare is turning. Ultimately, you should be able transform your enemy into your friend. The creature may change shape or age, it will go from something threatening to a kind and helpful guide. This is a sure sign you are integrating the different aspects of yourself into a more unified, less conflicted person.
The outcome of this will not be simply less nightmares and a better night’s sleep, but a new sense of confidence and creativity and wholeness in your waking life. Address the deeper conflict that causes your nightmares, and chances are your whole life will feel brighter. I will write more about how to prepare for nightmare conforntations tomorrow.
