How To Make Nightmares Go Away

How to Make Nightmares Go Away

Do you experience nightmares?

Do you get scared before you go to sleep because you know exactly what’s around the corner?

This is the case for so many of my clients I see in my trauma clinic.

The good news is that there are relatively easy methods to make the nightmares go away.

First of all lets talk about

Why Do We Get Nightmares

Nightmares can occur for other reasons than trauma but in this article I’m concentrating on nightmares due to trauma.

So, why do so many people experience nightmares after trauma?

The easy answer is because our brains feel this would be a good way to process the horrible things we’ve been through and feel better.

Research has shown that the amygdala get activated during nightmares. The amygdala is the part of the brain that alerts our bodies that there is danger and send signals to activate the fight, flight freeze response.

That’s why after a nightmare you may wake up sweating, heart racing or feeling frozen.

Nightmares have also been shown to be linked to our hippocampus area of the brain. This part deals with memory forming and plays a big part in how PTSD is formed (which I will go into in another blog).

That’s why they feel so vivid and real because the brain is drawing upon real life experiences couples with deep seated fears around those experiences.

Nightmares are often not exactly a replica of the traumatic event(s) but are very often close matches. And always replicate how the person felt in that moment in time.

The brain does this because it wants to process what’s happened so it can help you feel better.

What that part of the brain doesn’t realise is by giving you nightmares it makes you feel worse and often exacerbates fears.

In primitive societies dreams were revered as very important.

Researchers Hughes and Donald (2000) wrote how in ancient civilisations dreams were thought to come as clear message, or symbols requiring interpretation.

If someone was experiencing ‘bad’ dreams that would be looked at closely and that person would be helped to understand why they were having the dreams. And in certain societies there were rituals, songs and elders who would assist someone in mental distress.

We have lost so much of that collective healing in our modern society.

What can I do to make my nightmares go away?

This is where EMDR (eye movement desensitisation reprocessing) is a fantastic tool in the therapy room.

EMDR targets troubling memories in a way that a person feels safe to go there.

EMDR helps to process the memory out of the hippocampus area into long term memory banks so it looses it’s intensity. It often gathers different meaning too.

Therefore nightmares naturally go away because the brain doesn’t feel there is anything to process at night time anymore.

Things you can do at home.

1.  Self compassion- give yourself understanding and kindness and say nice things to self like; It's completely normal I’m having these nightmares and I’m trying to work out how to process them.

2.  Connect with the feelings- when you wake up from a nightmare connect with how you feel. Is it frightened, out of control, lost? Those feelings will give you big clues into what feelings your brain is trying to feel better about.

3.   Rewriting your nightmares- giving your nightmares a different ending can be very powerful.

For example, if you dream you your running away from someone chasing you and you wake up in a sweat with the feelings of being scared someone is going to catch you.

Think how you would like the dream to end so you feel you are in control.

It could be you imagine stopping running, turning around and confronting your persecutor. In this scenario you have magic powers and are able to blast them into outer space. It doesn’t matter if it’s complete fantasy, the important bit is you feel you have control. As that is what is lost when we go through trauma.

If you need any therapeutic support with your nightmares, I’m always here for a conversation to see if I can help. Contact me here.

References

Hughes, J. D. (2000). Dream interpretation in ancient civilizations. Dreaming, 10(1), 7–18. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1009447606158