Nightmares often prevent you from getting the proper rest.
Dreams and nightmares provide you with intuitive insights into your life if you can recount them. Clues to our anxieties, burdens and fears lay within the realm of the dreamworld. If you have trouble recalling your nightmares, you cannot deal with them and rationalize ways to avoid the same or another type of nightmare. Dreams and nightmares provide answers to our life-coping mechanisms within the brain. Resolving issues that are troubling you is not difficult if you practice remembering nightmares, jotting down thoughts and verbalizing these hidden anxieties.
Instructions
1. Place a journal or notebook beside your bed to jot down all memories of your nightmare if you awaken during the night. Writing down the thoughts, feelings and vague recollections helps you make sense of the nightmares later when you are fully awake. Even if you can only recount a smell, color or an image, write it down.
2. Talk to your partner if you have one about the nightmare. The comfort and reality of another person often makes going back to sleep less difficult. Nightmares allow you to process negative emotions that you don't or can't deal with during waking hours.
3. Lay in bed for a few minutes with your eyes shut upon wakening in the morning. Try to recount different aspects of your nightmare. The minutes before fully awakening are called the hypnopompic state. They provide an entry way into recalling the dream. Write down everything you recollect in your journal or notebook.
4. Practice nightmare and dream recollection every night. Soon it becomes an automatic habit. The thoughts you write down and verbalize are clues to what is troubling you and causing your nightmares.
5. Read your thoughts during a later time when you are fully awake. Indulge in self-talk, reassuring yourself that the nightmare is not real, not likely to happen and is simply torture that your self-conscious mind allows. Rationalize the chances of the nightmare occurring in reality. Implement changes in your lifestyle that prevents or reduces the chances of it actually happening.
6. Tell yourself at night before you go to sleep that the nightmare is a far touch from reality. Be confident of this belief; tell yourself you are taking steps to prevent it from happening and that even if it does, you will survive. Often, this type of self-talk discourages the nightmare from recurring and wreaking havoc in your life.
Tags: deal with, down thoughts, Dreams nightmares, Dreams nightmares provide, fully awake, journal notebook