Nightmares
In the internal realm, a nightmare is a particularly intense sleep dream with content that the dreamer finds disturbing. In the external realm, a nightmare is an intense and unpleasant condition, experience, or thought resembling a terrifying dream, which articulates an individual’s or a group’s greatest concerns, worries, and fears.
Nightmares are a type of dream characterized by content that the dreamer experiences as unpleasant and disturbing. Their content is intended to inform the dreamer that some aspect of the status quo is out of whack, is not in balance and is posing a threat to some system. Nightmares are like a flashing red light or a warning alarm, letting the dreamer know that the integrity of some life system is compromised and needs to be attended to.
Nightmares pertain to both the Inner World as well as the Outer world. Sleep nightmares emanate from the Inner world of an individual. As with all sleep dreams, the unconscious is running the show, presenting warning to the dreamer in the peculiar language of sleep dreams. While such dreams can be harrowingly terrifying, their purpose is not simply to give the dreamer the thrill of an adrenalin rush. Sleep nightmares scare the dreamer as a way to get her to pay particular attention to the dream. The element of fear is to let her understand that things are not hunky-dory, that there is something that needs to be paid attention to and acted upon. If we ignore sleep nightmares, typically they will re-appear ongoingly with increasing intensity until we pay attention to them. The problem is not that sleep nightmares cause discomfort; the problem is what the dream is telling us that needs to be addressed, inevitably an unpleasant situation that we have done everything in our power to ignore, but that is not going away.
Waking nightmares are situations and events in the outer world that have become unbalanced, deleterious to the well-being of individuals, groups, ecologies and geographies. Here, too, the stories result from the interaction of the conscious and the unconscious, but at the group or collective level. The more waking world actions are guided by the unconscious, the greater the probability of nightmares resulting. As with all dream work, the goal with nightmares is to make conscious more of our unconscious thoughts and feelings. If the Latin root of the word "sanity" means health, then waking nightmares inform us that external dream stories have become insane and need to be paid attention to and brought into equilibrium.
A major challenge with waking nightmares is to not ignore them, to not diminish their ugly truth, to not believe that they will not impact each individual and group that they brush up against. Just like individuals, so too collections of people are prone to developing addictive relationships with their dreams of ideals and refusing to realize that the dreams have become nightmares. Dreams of homeland security may be fine and dandy, but they can all too easily turn into nightmares of killing fields, torture and social disintegration, resulting in increased levels of insecurity. It is important that the collective dreamers of a waking nightmare comprehend that a dream has become destructive and must be re-calibrated to get back on track with the ideal that generated it.
Nightmares scream out to get our attention. They howl out for us to really apprehend what has gone wrong. They shriek for us to look past our oh-so-confortable (and self-flattering) veils of delusion and denial. They implore us to understand that something is, indeed, rotten in the state of Denmark. We must see what it is that has gone cockamamy. We must figure out what we need to do differently in order to restore sanity. And then, we must impliment these changes. This is a tall order for anyone addited to habitual patterns. Patterns are chains that enslave us. As time passes, addicts become comfortable with their enslavement. Change is virtually always uncomfortable, whether it is desired or not. That is why the world of dreams so often needs to resort to the ear-splitting exhortations and whip crackings of nightmares to get us to acknowledge a sorry state and act to change it.
On the planet Earth, every light creates a shadow. Shadows indicate connection with the earth, grounding. Nothing within the habitable zones on the planet can remain ungrounded for long. Many of our other dreams can have the tendency to have us as individuals and as groups, floating in etherial realms. We love to float like hot air balloons up, up and away, untethered from the stake of reality. Untethered balloons either crash or pop. Dreamfulness, which involves practicing Mindfulness, Heartfulness, Bodyfulness and Soulfulness, serves to keep dreamers grounded, connected to earth, from which no human can successfully escape. Nightmares are the necessary shadows that ground the feet of our giddy dreams in reality. Making dreams of any type real is a nuanced and complicated process, one that can easily jump rail and barrel along on the wrong track, bound for wreckage. Nightmares are the conductor in the caboose letting the train's engineer up front know that things are not right. The warnings sounded by nightmares are not to be avoided. The fear they engender is intended to get us to wake up and undertake dreamful actions to right the course of our dream trains.