In this blog post, I will introduce the impact of recurring nightmares on our daily lives and realistic ways to overcome them by controlling our dreams.
Humans spend one-third of their lives sleeping. During this long and short time, we dream countless dreams. Sleep plays an important role in our lives, and during this time, our bodies and minds are restored and we gain new energy. However, sometimes this time of recovery is replaced by discomfort and fear. You’ve probably had a scary or terrible dream at least once. We all call these dreams “nightmares.” The “nightmares” we often talk about are more than just unpleasant. This is because the fear or anxiety felt in the unconscious is expressed through dreams.
The impact of nightmares does not end with the fear of the moment. Nightmares have a deep impact on our daily lives. Most people will feel uneasy all day if they had a violent dream the night before, and they will behave cautiously that day. Few people can feel calm in an unpleasant dream. In particular, if a nightmare repeats itself often or is very vividly remembered, a person cannot be free from the fear of the nightmare. Although dreams are not our reality, they sometimes leave us with more intense emotions than reality.
So why do we have nightmares? According to experts, nightmares are the product of stress, anxiety, or psychological conflict. Many people feel that they are more likely to have nightmares on days when they are stressed or have a lot of worries. So how can we overcome these nightmares?
Have you ever imagined that you could change your dreams with your own will? It may sound a bit strange and far-fetched, but I have often thought that it would be great if I could change my dreams at will whenever I had a nightmare. If I could turn a scary situation to my advantage, then that dream would no longer be a nightmare. In fact, we often do things unconsciously to control our dreams while we sleep. What if BLACKPINK appeared in your dream? What if your phone vibrates at the crucial moment when you are about to see BLACKPINK up close and you wake up? Then nine out of ten people will go back to sleep because they need to see BLACKPINK in the continuation of their previous dream. Regardless of whether we succeed or not, we are unconsciously trying to control our emotions.
The method I will be talking about to deal with nightmares comes from this proactive attitude of intervening in nightmares. In fact, I was skeptical when I first encountered this method. But the effect was much stronger than I expected. The fear in a dream depends on how we accept it. If we can actively transform and intervene in our dreams rather than simply passively experiencing them, nightmares will no longer haunt us.
Now, let’s get back to the main topic and talk about nightmares. So, how should we overcome nightmares? Here is a situation in a dream. In the middle of the night, you are left alone in the forest, and at this time, a man with a black face, wearing a black hat and half-covered by a mask, is chasing you. The only thing you can do now is to keep running straight ahead. The moment your breathing quickens and you feel your breath run out, the road in front of you is a cliff. At this moment, you will no longer be able to tell whether this situation is real or a dream. You will eventually fall off the cliff and wake up with a start.
This dream is a nightmare that I have been experiencing since I was quite young. Like many children experience growing pains, I also had complex sleep disorders when I was young. My symptoms were worse than those of ordinary children. Not only did I suffer from nightmares of this kind every day, but I also had sleepwalking symptoms that prevented me from sleeping properly every night. I think I was awakened by screams many times while I was sleeping. People who have often suffered from nightmares know that this makes you very anxious in your daily life.
When I first had the dream, I didn’t do anything about it. My parents, who were watching me, also didn’t take my situation seriously at first. However, as time passed, the number of episodes increased and the situation repeated itself, and the whole family actively searched for a treatment to avoid the nightmare. However, none of the methods seemed to work. When they went to the hospital, they were told that it was stress-related, and when they went to a traditional Korean medicine clinic, they were given herbal medicine because the child’s qi was weak, but the situation did not change. I tried changing the direction of my bed, thinking that if my head was facing north, I would have bad dreams. But the nightmares continued with the same repertoire. Looking back on it now, it’s ridiculous and makes me laugh, but I once even wore a talisman against nightmares. At the time, I was so afraid to go to bed every night.
Until then, I had only thought about how to avoid having nightmares. But at some point, I changed my attitude and tried to actively intervene in my nightmares. First, I thought about why I was afraid of dreams. A few years before the nightmares started, I had lost my way and followed a strange man, and I thought that maybe that fact had been reflected in my dreams. The extreme fear of falling is a fear that still haunts me as an adult, and even now I cannot look down properly from a height of about three stories. After all, the reason I was afraid of nightmares was because the man chasing me was a stranger, and the cliff was high.
Now that I know why, I should actively reflect my thoughts in my dreams. First, I thought of my own image in my head before going to bed. Then, I went back to the dream scene and thought about what was wrong and how it should be changed. For example, an unfamiliar man suddenly becomes a cute puppy, or a cliff turns out to be a soft cushion. It’s not something that ends after one or two times. You have to picture it in your head at least dozens of times. Once you’ve prepared this, you’re done. This is how I imagined this dream every night before going to sleep.
Did this method really work for me? Did the man who was chasing me disappear? Did the cliff appear for me? To be honest, I didn’t completely stop having nightmares after that. But I can say for sure that the level of fear has noticeably decreased, and my attitude has changed a lot. Since then, I have occasionally had nightmares of the same content, but I no longer feel anxious or avoid being alone all day like I used to. The story of the nightmare that tormented me so much in my childhood ended in this really simple way. The story of how I once suffered from a serious sleep disorder has also become a distant memory.
I don’t know what happened, but the day before I wrote this, I had a scary dream for the first time in a long time. I woke up with a start today. Since I have one more blog post, I have ironically benefited from the nightmare this time. I started this to change my dreams, but this method only imagines the flow of dreams. You can’t suddenly create a dream that didn’t exist. Just because you imagine winning the lottery a hundred times, your ancestors won’t suddenly appear and tell you the winning numbers. But even that small change could be a positive help to many people like me who are afraid to fall asleep because of nightmares. Let’s actively confront bad dreams. Dreams are just dreams, and we have the power to change them.
