"The practice of equanimity is particularly helpful for nightmares. Of all the practices you could apply, it is most helpful and comforting, after you have awakened, to generate a sense of equanimity – the similarity of aim – between yourself and the dream-monster.“ Jeffrey Hopkins offers a Buddhist, meditative perspective on interacting with sleep nightmares ("Dealing with Nightmares,“ Snow Lion newspaper & catalog, Spring 2008).
How to practice equanimity? "In meditation, contemplate: 'Just as I want happiness and don’t want suffering, so that monster wants happiness and doesn’t want suffering.‘“ Hopkins offers a way to interact with the terrors of nightmares without being consumed by fear. "Try to see the being as wanting happiness and not wanting suffering, as having been a friend, and, when a friend, having extended great kindess.“ The idea is to devise a way to interact calmly with the nightmare image. "Play with it a little.“
He explains the power of equanimity. "We are seeking to disempower a complex that appears as a dream-monster, and the power of equanimity dissolves the fear that empowers the monster. In meditation, contemplate: 'This nightmare-spider, like me, wants happiness and does not want suffering; so may this nightmare-spider have happiness and be free from suffering.‘“
This approach can be used in dealing with waking nightmares too. "Let’s consider nightmarish figures such as Hitler and Stalin who have appeared in the world. They had very strange ideas about achieving happiness, through bringing extreme pain on others. Nevertheless, no matter how crazy they were, how stupid, how silly, how demented, still – just like me – they wanted happiness and didn’t want suffering. I will never decide that their techniques are good, but still, when they had a pain in their back, they wanted relief. They had weird ideas about how to gain happiness and a blindness to recognizing the evidence staring them in the face. But they were still sentient beings.“
All dream imagery, whether from the sleep or waking realms, whether pleasant or terrifying, teaches us about ourselves, too. "It helps to think that such powerfully bad persons – or ourselves when we get angry and do nasty things – have fallen out of recognition that other people want happiness and don’t want suffering. From this understanding there arises a closeness with those under the influence of strong afflictive emotions.“
As in any practice of Dreamfulness, this approach to taming nightmares can be applied in all aspects of our lives. "If you familiarize yourself for a considerable period with these meditations that utilize horrific situations for increasing equanimity, reflecting on many individual people, gradually your sense of equanimity, and even-mindedness, will extend to anyone who appears.“