Dreams, do you have them?

[Midnight Writer]

4. Folk think this is flaky, but I have had success with some Lucid Dreaming techniques.

I had terrible nightmares since I was a kid. Dreams of me dying horribly, chased by monsters, etc. Would wake up and spent the rest of the night afraid to fall back asleep.

I took a notebook and pen and put it on my bed side table. When I would wake from a nightmare, I would turn on the light and write down everything I could remember in the dream. Soon patterns started to emerge. There were certain elements that kept repeating, cropping up again and again. Once I had identified some of the recurring themes (one, for example, was skeletons chasing me), I was able to identify them in my dreams. So if a skeleton started chasing me, I knew it was a dream and I didn't have to be afraid.

In other words, when something scary and freaky happened in my dreams, I was able to recognize inside my dream that it was indeed a dream. It wasn't real. Once I knew I was in a nightmare, I could dispel it, or at least change elements of it to my liking.

This was gradual, took years, but now my nightmares are scarce, and often even when one does break through my defenses, I am able to alter it, take control of the narrative, change it into something not so bad.