Have you ever Wondered Why You Have Nightmares?

Running for our lives, tumbling into a bottomless pit, being confined and/or held against our will are among the most common themes that can plague our nightmare type visitations. Cruelty, brutality and viciousness prevail. We awaken sweating, sometimes shouting out loud, struggling to reclaim an equilibrium. There is no relief so huge as when we realize we were snagged in a nightmare and not living this horror in our waking life! Although relieved, we’re often left with a lingering sense of fear and dread. There used to be a common old-English expression, “It’s like someone walked across my grave”, as a way of describing this creepy and lingering feeling. A sense of pending doom might remain for days.

There are many life experiences that can trigger a nightmare; fear of failure, poor health, feeling victimized (bullied) at home or work, performance anxiety to name a few. Being faced with a difficult choice, behaving in a manner unfamiliar to our self-concept, abandonment, loneliness, lack of safety can all trigger the advent of a nightmare.

Another common cause is trauma. We may not be able to think about the trauma because the effects are still present and raw. Our consciousness however, must integrate and file these experiences into our psychic makeup. We must give them context and meaning to hopefully reach a place of peace and acceptance.

What About Psychic Nightmares?

I’ve avoided the topic of psychic nightmares up until now which is odd considering dreams and tarot psychic readings are both my thing. I think I’ve avoided it because there is a bigger-than-life, terrifying aspect to psychic nightmares which reaches even beyond the garden-variety nightmare experience. These are the nightmares that do manifest in our waking lives or in the lives of our loved ones. Sometimes we have nightmares involving the collective, such as a natural disaster or a major transit accident, like plane crashes or train derailments.

Psychic nightmares possess a distinct quality, identifying them as different from a personal nightmare: A stark realism beyond what typical nightmares display, for example, in the form of distinctive sounds and bright colours. Your positioning in relationship to the scene is likely odd as well. You might be observing and listening to the reactions of others from an impossible-to-realistically-achieve vantage point.

We wonder, why have these crazy precognitive nightmares when we’re unable to change the outcome or help? Maybe we needed to be reminded of a spiritual reality we’ve been overlooking, such as, how we are all connected, that you can trust your spiritual messages, intuition and ways of knowing that are difficult to describe to people in your life. The why will be explained in how you feel after the event has taken place. An event you were presented to ahead of time! How did you feel upon learning that what you had a nightmare about unfolded exactly as you dreamt it? That might be the most salient point of the whole exercise. Knowing an event ahead of time through a dream experience is not a message you should ever ignore. At the very least this event has a message for you and spirit had only one avenue left to get it to you which was in the form of a nightmare.

If you’ve experienced a psychic nightmare, you have probably storied it to whomever will listen. I’m fairly confident you can describe both the nightmare and the later manifestation in intricate detail. These psychic nightmares leave us with a montage of questions about destiny, messages from the beyond, about how so much of life experience is about being at a certain place at a certain time.

Nightmares as Creative Inspiration

Ignoring or discounting nightmares as only dreams won’t help in coping with them for like most forgotten dreams, they will simply return. Do what you can to interpret the meaning of the symbols, characters, feeling and action. If the nightmare is asking you a question, what would that be? Further, you might consider a couple of different endings to the dream.

A nightmare is typically interrupted by an abrupt awakening triggered by our increased heart rate and breath; using your imagination envision what the ending might have been or what ending your ego would give it. Notice your temptation to sugar-coat which may be what the nightmare is shouting at you to change.

Use the nightmare as a creative inspiration. Draw, paint or collage the images. Title your nightmare. The stories of Jekyl and Hyde, Frankenstein, and Dracula were all inspired by nightmares. When you describe a nightmare to someone, it is likely they will immediately identify and empathize with your experience. There is nothing quite like sharing a nightmare to bring an uncommon level of intimacy into your social intercourse! If it comes true at some future date, you’ve recorded it in your personal dream book and brought in witnesses.

Powerful cache, trust me.

Blessings Kathleen

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