I had a nightmare last night. Don’t need to go into it but it combined two things I’m not crazy about and I even know what I’ve seen/thought recently that most likely triggered it. However at 3:25 in the morning, you just want to go back to sleep. I turned on the TV and pulled up Laura with Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews and Clifton Webb. I know the first 10 minutes by heart because that’s about how long it takes me to fall back to sleep with it playing. I didn’t make it 10 minutes in this time.
How to you deal with bad dreams?
Trail Baboon 
Great post 😁
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Thanks. Welcome to the Trail.
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I guess they don’t happen often enough that I have a plan. I used to try and write down dreams, including bad ones, but who wants to remember the scary stuff?
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Hence my not going into detail about the nightmare itself.
And I would have to say my plan usually applies to just waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall back asleep, not really having anything to do with nightmares, which luckily aren’t that often.
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My. Methods as well. If the tv doesn’t work, I try a podcast with soft voices.
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If you are virtuous, conscientious and friendly enough, you just don’t get bad dreams. Ever. That’s my plan.
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Since I subscribe to the “Flotsam and Jetsam” theory of dreams, I can say that you can be friendly and conscientious and still get the occasional whopper.
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Snort!
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I’ve been trying to remember a nightmare. I had one in which George W Bush was chasing me in an old Victorian mansion with a pistol. But that wasn’t scary. I assumed a man who did virtually nothing well would not be much of a threat with a pistol.
Sometime in the 1980s I woke up sobbing from a nightmare in which my dog Brandy had a fatal cancer. About two years later she got a fatal cancer.
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Ooh, I hate it when they’re prophetic.
I had one back in the 70s about being chased (?) by a guy named Ronald Ray-Gun. That was when I was in therapy (and writing these down) – I should look and see if I can locate that one in a journal…
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All it takes is for one bad dream to come true. After that, any nightmare will be scarier.
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Thanks for this VS.
I have been having odd, strange dreams for the last month. I’m not sure if some stuff I’m involved with right now is triggering them or what.
But if they’re real bad I have to get up and walk around for a minute. Even a drink and bathroom break will do it.
If I just lay there I can’t get them out of my head.
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I lie in bed and say to myself, repeatedly: It was just a dream, it was just a dream, it was just a dream. Eventually I can calm down enough to get back to sleep.
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What sucks is when you have a great dream and wake up with a happy glow . . . and then slowly the realization sinks in that it was just a dream.
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Too too true
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Guess I’m lucky. Often the glow from a wonderful dream will carry over for the entire day. With bad dreams, when I finally wrest myself awake, I give a huge sigh of relief at the realization that it was just a dream; then it just dissipates. As far as dreams being prophetic, it’s probably a good thing that we don’t realize it at the time of the dream. My theory is that those kinds of dreams are the result of something we secretly, perhaps even subconsciously, dread or fear.
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By the way, Steve, I meant to say yesterday that your photos were a welcome relief from our current cold snap. Some snap!
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Thanks PJ!
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The only dreams that bother me are the ones I have that involve the Indian spirit world. I know that sounds pretty weird, but I have had at least two that were not just from my psyche. On both occasions I felt like a conduit for an alternate Indian spirit universe. They occur when I have had intense visits with native friends and participated in native ceremonies. I consider myself a Dust Bowl empiricist when it comes to science, so you can imagine how strange this is for me when it happens.
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Wow, Renee, that’s actually pretty cool in my book. I’m sure it feels weird, though.
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wow sorry guys
i guess o never thought about it but i never have bad dreams
i have lots of dreams where i’m working hard to get to a goal or out of a predicament but never a bad dream just a challenge to work through
that’s different right
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I think you’re right, tim, but knowing the enthusiasm with which you tackle problems that some of us would consider pretty overwhelming, I might consider some of your dreams “bad.” Don’t know for sure though.
I don’t have many dreams that I would consider really bad or terrifying, but I do have a fair amount of dreams where I’m lost somewhere, often in a crowded place, looking for a bathroom. Inevitably I’ll wake up from such a dream because I do, indeed, need to use the facilities. Luckily, I know where they are in our house.
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A lot of my ‘normal’ dreams are me mouthing off to someone I shouldn’t be provoking, and then lots of me running and them chasing.
It’s like I’m reliving my high school years!
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The most vivid spirit dream I had was one in which I dreamed a friend of ours, a Lakota traditional healer from Pine Ridge, was at a college of some sort and I was watching him give a lecture in a room filled with people sitting in overstuffed chairs and sofas. He started speaking oddly, and everyone asked me what he was doing and I said “oh, he’s just having a vision”. In the dream I was seated on a sofa with other people. I started waking up from the dream and was half awake, still half dreaming, when I felt myself getting bumped on my hip by two invisible beings who wanted to sit next to me and were bumping into me to get me to move over. The weird thing about it was that I felt the bumping with my awake mind, too, and got the distinct impression that the spirits were in my dream and in my bedroom actually bumping into me.
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That’s sort of fascinating and unsettling at the same time.
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you give me the impression you don’t want to acknowledge the reality of spirits?
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Oh, they are real. I have no doubt. I just don’t want them to bump me.
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having dreams reminds me of eating a wonderful meal . when you take a bite the flavor the body feels is the best part
i have recently restarted my dream journals but it doesn’t sir well because i have to snapboutvofvitvenough yobwtiyrvitvfiwn and yhstsblike drinking apple cider binager after a great meal. it wipes out the savoring of the moment i like to lay in warm embrace of my dreams until i’m done going over the parts i enjoy kind of like swishing the saliva around to study the nuances of the glorious food that just entered my mouth
dreams entered my inner self and deserve to be enjoyed the same way
bad dreams…. apple cider vinaigrette please
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If you go slowly and sound out all the words, you can get it….
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🙂 🙂 🙂
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I’ve had nightmares in the past, but not anytime recently. My bad dreams don’t frighten me, just provoke anxiety. Many mornings I’m just glad to wake up from wherever I was.
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Several years ago I had several dreams of hitting glare ice while driving, or things like that where I had completely lost control. Now I wish I had at least written down the date, as I’m not sure what was going on in my life at the time, but clearly it was about not having control of things.
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In recent years I’ve gained a new power over bad dreams. That’s odd in itself, for aging is so much about losing things, including losing ways of defeating difficulties. When I get in a scary situation in a dream now, I tell the people threatening me, “You don’t frighten me. This is just a damn dream.” And *poof* the dream ends.
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Nice tool to have – thanks for the idea!
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