Jen Sonstein Maidenberg

Often what compels a person to start researching or working with dreams is a nightmare. People have a hard time accepting their bad dreams. They want them to stop. I completely understand this. You may have found this web site precisely because you were searching for a way to get the bad dreams to stop.

I don’t have an easy way to help you get your bad dreams to stop. You likely have discovered for yourself that nightmares are resistant to even the most masterful of control freaks among us; which is to say that the most hidden feelings that want to be known consciously by us will eventually make their way into our dreams, no matter how much we try to repress them in waking life. This is why nightmares recur.

What I can offer you is a way to work in collaboration with your bad dreams. When we are willing to turn toward that which is disturbing to us in a dream, the nightmares may at the very least start to slowly change in their frequency and content. Even better, we may find that we ourselves respond differently inside the disturbing dream, and after.

Most of us, however, resist disturbing dream images and feelings (mainly by forgetting them), and, as a result, miss an opportunity to know ourselves, and our deep feelings, more intimately.

This knowing of ourselves is what the “bad dream” actually wants for us in most cases. (Specific trauma-related nightmares may require a slightly different approach.) 

When a dream image disturbs us, we often label that dream “a nightmare.” Practically and objectively, however, a nightmare is simply a dream with images or feelings that make us uncomfortable. Sure a dream can sometimes make you so uncomfortable you feel real terror, dread, pain, shame, or sorrow. But what’s continually interesting to me as a dreamwork practitioner (and more essentially as a lover of the dream) is that one person’s disturbing image may be another person’s “meh.” What may terrify you at two in the morning, may only moderately provoke me (and vice versa!) I see this time and again with my own dreams and with the dreams others tell me. We don’t necessarily respond similarly to a particular image or event; and this actually can be helpful to someone who comes to me wishing for change when it comes to bad dreams.

It may surprise you, intrigue you, or even reassure you to know that as I have become willing to remember some of my disturbing dreams, and write them down in the middle of the night when I am still swimming in the discomfort of them, I am (occasionally) the one who upon waking says “Meh” to the nightmare I just had. 

This is a bit of an exaggeration, but I am exaggerating to make a point, which is that I have learned that Dream Me and Waking Me operate in different modes of perception, feeling, processing, and meaning-making. And that when the two meet when I am awake and in dreamwork mode, their merging may transform a nightmare into insight or even deep wisdom that benefits me in both states. But I must be willing to stay with the feeling the dream arouses in me; this is how the healing and change happen.

My own willingness and capacity to remember disturbing dreams did not come quickly or easily to me. The safe, trustful container of ongoing dreamwork sessions with my practitioner helped me get more comfortable with being uncomfortable returning to a disturbing dream. Then, over time, the positive results that came from working a nightmare in a dreamwork session were reinforced, and I became braver and more willing to write down my nightmares and revisit them.

I suppose you might want an example. I would want an example.

I’m going to share with you below a nightmare I worked early on with my dreamwork practitioner, and then below that one, I’m going to share a nightmare I worked three years later. I am using these dreams as a pair because, as you may see for yourself, the dreams themselves show a kind of evolution in my own personal narrative around what’s terrifying to me, as well as a willingness to immerse myself in the sometimes deep, terrifying waters of dreams (literally, in this case, and figuratively.)

As you read my scary-to-me dreams, I invite you to slowly immerse yourself in each dream with me, and consider what it feels like to be inside the dream yourself. Sometimes, staying in another person’s dream can bring a feeling of our own to the surface.

Dream 1:

I am in what I believe to be a mikveh (Jewish ritual bathing pool). I realize something: I am afraid of deep water. I don’t allow myself to fully immerse because I am afraid. I decide that now that I know of this, I am a little safer. As a result, I choose to challenge myself and immerse. As soon as I do, though, I feel something pull at my feet. Something is trying to suck me down there to the deep. It feels supernatural. I start to scream, but can’t. I’m so so scared. I am able to pull myself up and out onto the floor, but barely. I lay on the floor – tired.

Would you call this a nightmare if it had been your dream?

Stay in my dream with me for just a moment longer before reading on.

Stay in the moment of being in the water despite being afraid of it. Then feel the supernatural-type suction pulling at you from below.

How do you feel now?

* * *

In Natural Dreamwork, we’re often assigned a little bit of homework to carry the dreamwork session forward into our lives. We’re asked to sit quietly with the images and feelings in the days between sessions.

My dreamwork practitioner, Rodger, offered me the below for homework:

“Feel yourself entering the mikveh, and that moment of determination when knowing you are afraid, when you immerse completely. Feel the suction — the terror of giving in to a force much greater than your mind. Notice the reaction of wanting to escape, but just stay a couple moments longer.”

Notice that Rodger doesn’t push me to overcome my fear. He doesn’t judge me for wanting to escape the suction. He simply invites me to stay with my terror a few moments more, and notice my reaction to it. Sometimes all it takes for a “nightmare” image to do its work of healing is being willing to stay with the feeling it evokes a few moments longer. 

There is medicine simply in the willingness to stay. 

Dream 2: 

I am near the sea walking on the sand. Buildings are close by and line the shore. I’m near a building on stilts and realize I should probably head up because the next wave or two could reach me. I hear a woman tell someone, ‘Don’t worry. The waves sweep you out, but they all return, every single one, so just relax and they will bring you back.’ She seems to know this place well and speaks like a native might to a tourist.

I consider what she’s saying and wonder if I could just relax and allow myself to be swept out to sea as she suggests and not panic. Someone else nearby is talking about near death experience.

Shift

Then I am in the waves. I feel myself beneath the water and see water all around me. It’s overwhelming, chaotic. I don’t have any view of land, just large waves of brown-green sea.

I feel the current dragging me, whirling me. Oh, I must be in a rip current. I’m very afraid and yet also … accepting? Perhaps there is even glee?

There’s nothing to do, so I let it take me, but when I have little breath left, I’m suddenly very scared. 

Then I feel with the top of my arms the air, and then I know the direction to swim toward and I am able to reach up for breath

I’m not sure — I may call for help at this point.

Both dreams involve deep water, though the first is contained and the second is much more vast.

Both dreams illustrate a certain willingness in me to know my fear and even be with it, but also present me with an event that illustrates the limit of what I am able to accept and stay with. 

In the second dream, notably, there is a figure of support: the woman who says, “Don’t worry. The waves sweep you out, but they all return, every single one, so just relax and they will bring you back.”

Of course, she was speaking to me, even though from the dream perspective I wasn’t sure she was. This is what we call in Natural Dreamwork a sacred encounter, and this dream woman knows me so well that she knew exactly how to speak to me so that I might actually hear her words and take them in.

And I did take them in. You can see it in the second part of the dream. The fact that I am in the sea at all — as opposed to back up in the apartment building, where I might have headed had my anxiety over the rising tide won out — is indicative of my willingness to listen to her guidance.

Apparently, I allowed the waves to sweep me out. I trusted this woman’s guidance enough to try it for myself even though the dream “fast forwards” in the way dreams do.

As I understood how vast the sea was and how deep the waters were, fear began to creep up. Still, there was a small voice in me that wondered if the second part of her message was true: “Just relax and they will bring you back.” 

In the dream, I do just that until … the breath runs out.

And then … I reach my limit. The fear overwhelms me. 

The dream was kind, and offered me a way up and out. Dreams are much kinder than we realize.

Again, my dreamwork practitioner Rodger met me where I was at. He sat with me through my terror, and he recognized my limitation along with me. He did not push me or judge me for having a limit for what I could bear. Instead, he sat with me as I felt the embodied feeling of terror and breathlessness, and then he brought the feeling and the insight gained from our work together as a consideration for my waking life spiritual practice.

His homework was:

“Feel the overwhelming fear, the current dragging you– both terrifying, but this strange glee also. Know that you are being carried by a force much greater than your will, that it is joining forces with you….

Let these dreams guide you in waking life to giving into the waves of feeling, to letting yourself get carried away instead of trying to control outcomes for others.”

* * *

Our disturbing dreams, when we are willing to remember and re-enter them, enable us to act as witness to our own terror, our own grief, our own dread.

This in and of itself is a gift to the one who dreams.

When you remember the dream and choose to go more deeply into it with someone who offers you a safe container for doing so, the dream itself can shift — not in a way that necessarily eliminates the dread, fear, or sorrow, but in a way that enables you to metabolize it. Just as your body metabolizes food to turn it into energy for you, your slowing down to immerse in a dream can metabolize feelings in a way that can become wisdom.

Rodger’s homework — “Feel the fear…Let these dreams guide you” — invites me to stay a little longer with the fear so that I may process and integrate it. And then he is asking me to be willing to do this in waking life, too, in smaller moments of fear or anxiety. He — and the supportive dream figure — are asking me to allow the waves of feeling to sweep me out for a bit, instead of running from them or rushing to do something about them. In the ocean, I am shown there are times when there is nothing I can do even if I want to. There’s a brief moment of glee, of liberation in that realization.

I hope my sharing makes you curious enough to try it for yourself; in a gentle way, at first. Perhaps, you’ll dream a dream in the near future you would ordinarily forget on purpose. Instead of forgetting, write down a few details and then choose in the morning if you want to re-enter it on your own, in a dream circle, or with your own dreamwork practitioner. 

Notice if the dream feels as scary or as sad to you in the daytime as it did in the night. See if you’re able to toggle between what it felt like when you first woke up from the dream and now when you’re reading it in the daytime or some days later. Try to inhabit both versions of yourself: the dream You with his terror or grief or shame or longing. And waking You, with your ability to sit in silence with that part of yourself, to comfort that part of yourself, to advise that part of yourself, to accept that part of yourself.

Simply being willing to accompany yourself in such a way can bring about healing.