This blog post explores the impact recurring nightmares have on our routines and introduces practical methods to regulate and overcome them.
Humans spend one-third of their lives asleep. During this time, which can feel both long and short, we experience countless dreams. Sleep plays a vital role in our lives, allowing our bodies and minds to recover and recharge. Yet, sometimes this restorative time can turn into discomfort and fear. You’ve probably experienced at least one frightening, terrifying dream. We call these dreams ‘nightmares’. The commonly referred to ‘nightmare’ carries more meaning than simple unpleasantness. This is because fears or anxieties felt in the unconscious are expressed through dreams.
The impact of nightmares doesn’t end with the fear of the moment. Nightmares profoundly affect our daily lives. Most people, after a particularly disturbing dream, will feel uneasy all day long and act cautiously for that entire day. Few can remain calm and peaceful after a bad dream. Especially if nightmares recur frequently or their content is vividly remembered, a person cannot escape the fear they instill. Dreams, though not our reality, sometimes leave behind emotions more intense than reality itself.
So why do we suffer from nightmares? According to experts, nightmares are products of stress, anxiety, or psychological conflict. Many people feel they tend to have nightmares more often on stressful days or when they have many worries. So how can we overcome these nightmares?
Have you ever imagined being able to change your dreams by your own will? It might sound a bit outlandish and absurd, but whenever I had a nightmare, I often thought how wonderful it would be if I could alter the dream at will. If I could turn a frightening situation to my advantage, that dream wouldn’t be a nightmare anymore. In fact, attempting to control dreams during sleep is something we do unconsciously quite often. What if BLACKPINK appeared in your dream? What if, right at that crucial moment when you were about to see BLACKPINK up close, your phone vibrated and woke you up? Nine times out of ten, you’d try to fall back asleep. Because you need to see BLACKPINK again, continuing from the previous dream. Regardless of success, we unconsciously attempt this kind of control.
The method for dealing with nightmares I’ll discuss stems from this attitude of actively intervening in them. Honestly, I was skeptical when I first encountered this approach. But its effectiveness was far more powerful than I expected. The fear we experience in dreams changes depending on how we accept it. If we can actively transform and intervene in our dreams, rather than just passively experiencing them, nightmares will no longer torment us.
Now, returning to the main topic, let’s discuss nightmares. So, how should one overcome nightmares? Consider this dream scenario: Deep in the night, you find yourself alone in a forest. A man with a black face, wearing a black hat, his face half-concealed by a mask, is chasing you. The only thing you can do now is run forward, staring straight ahead. As your breathing grows more ragged and your breath catches in your throat, the path before you suddenly becomes a cliff. In that moment, you can no longer tell if this is reality or a dream. Backpedaling, you finally fall off the cliff, and at that instant, you jolt awake.
This nightmare has haunted me since I was quite young. Like many children who experience growing pains, I too suffered from complex sleep disorders in my childhood. My symptoms were more severe than those of ordinary children. Back then, I was tormented by this nightmare every single day, and sleepwalking symptoms also appeared, preventing me from getting proper sleep night after night. I seem to have woken up screaming multiple times even while asleep. Those who have frequently suffered nightmares know that this leads to profound psychological anxiety in daily life.
When I first had that dream, I couldn’t do much about it. My parents, watching from the sidelines, initially didn’t take my situation seriously. But as time passed, the frequency increased, the situation repeated itself, and the entire family actively sought treatment methods to escape the nightmares. Yet, no method seemed to work. Hospitals dismissed it as stress-related, and traditional Korean medicine clinics prescribed tonics for a child’s weak constitution, but nothing changed. We even changed the bed’s orientation, believing sleeping with my head facing north caused bad dreams. Still, the nightmares persisted with the same recurring themes. Looking back now, it’s laughable, but I even wore protective amulets on my body because of the nightmares. Back then, going to bed every night was terrifying.
Up until then, I had only worried about ways to avoid having nightmares. But at some point, I changed my attitude and decided to actively intervene in the nightmares. First, I thought about why I feared dreams. Several years before the nightmares began, I had once gotten lost and followed a strange man. I wondered if that experience might have been projected into my dreams. An extreme fear of falling still torments me as an adult; even now, I can’t properly look down from heights of just three stories. Ultimately, the reason I feared the nightmare was because the man chasing me was a stranger, and the cliff was so high.
Now that I know the reason, I must actively reflect my thoughts within the dream. First, before going to sleep, I thoroughly imagined my own images in my mind. Returning to the dream scene, I considered what was wrong and how it needed to change. For instance, the unfamiliar man suddenly becomes a cute puppy, or the cliff turns out to be not a precipice but a soft cushion. This isn’t a thought that stops after once or twice. I had to repeatedly visualize it in my mind at least dozens of times. That was all I could prepare. Every night before falling asleep, I imagined the dream turning out this way.
Did this method actually work for me? Did the man chasing me disappear? Did the precipice stop appearing? To be honest, I didn’t completely stop having nightmares after that. But what I can say for sure is that the intensity of that fear noticeably decreased, and my attitude changed significantly compared to before. Even though I occasionally had the same nightmare afterward, I no longer spent the entire day anxious or avoiding it like I used to. The nightmare that tormented me so terribly in my childhood ended in this truly simple way. The story of how I once seriously suffered from sleep disorders has also become a distant memory.
For some reason I can’t quite explain, the day before writing this, I had a terrifying dream for the first time in ages. I woke up with a start today. Since I’ve added one more blog post, ironically, this time I’ve benefited from the nightmare. While I started this to change my dreams, this method only imagines the flow of dreams. You can’t suddenly create a dream that never existed. Just because you imagine winning the lottery hundreds of times doesn’t mean your ancestors will suddenly appear and tell you the numbers. However, I believe even that small change could positively help countless people like me who dread falling asleep because of nightmares. Let’s actively confront bad dreams. Dreams are just dreams; we have the power to change them.
