Nightmares and Night terrors

It seems difficult for people to talk about their nightmares. Even if the person has told me during their assessment that they suffer from nightmares, I often find people don’t talk about them in any detail until we have been working together for a while.

Maybe by then they feel more able to trust me with their very personal experiences. I also think it has something to do with the anxiety of talking about something they find both disturbing and that they have no control over.

Nightmares and night terrors can be very disabling. They can wake us up in the middle of the night, sometimes several times a night. We may wake in a panic or sweating profusely or with very believable scary images and pictures in our head. It can be very hard to get back to sleep afterwards.

As with panic attacks generally, the first thing to do after a nightmare is to slow down our breathing so that we can manage our emotions enough to calm down. Like a daytime panic attack, the aim is to put distance between the nightmare or night terror and ourselves, so that we understand that the nightmare is not reality. We need to spend time grounding ourselves. We need to appreciate that we are in a safe place doing what we normally do and understand that what happened in the nightmare is nothing to do with our current situation. We can do this by telling ourselves that we are safe; by naming out loud the day of the week and where we are and what we are doing. For example, “today is Thursday, I’m at 24 Holly Close, I’m warm and safe at home in my bedroom”.

Once we have calmed down, we should try to either get up and find something to do to further calm our mind and body (perhaps make a herbal tea or hot milky drink and read or follow a guided meditation) or go back to sleep.

It is usually easy to remember our nightmares and night terrors because they stay with us and are hard to forget. There is usually a correlation between the nightmares being shared and explored and the severity and frequency of them as experienced by the dreamer. Over time, nightmares shared can diminish, even disappear altogether.

There are many reasons why we may have nightmares. They are often linked to trauma. Maybe we have experienced something so hideous that we are unable to erase it from our memories. Understandably – consciously or unconsciously – we have put the experience of memory to the back of our mind because we don’t want think about it again.

Our psyche has done its best for us. We don’t want to remember the event, so it has locked it away safely. However, for some reason, the memory is beginning to come back to us. Maybe something has triggered the memory. For example, we meet someone who looks like someone from our past who disturbed us. This can remind us of the event again. We don’t want to think about it during our waking hours – but we are unable to totally pack it away into our unconscious – so it pops up again in the night when we can’t control it.

Because the images that disturb us can be so upsetting it’s important to work very gradually with them.

A professional qualified therapist who works with dreams and the unconscious can encourage you to think about your nightmares very gently if you want to. In time, you will be able talk about them and explore the triggers and causes. As the images and memories are shared in a safe and gentle way they can feel less of the monster.

Whilst we can do nothing to change the fact that the events happened and led to the disturbing night terrors, by looking realistically and logically at the memories from a pragmatic perspective, the client is often able to understand the experience more fully. This can give relief and a deeper understanding of what happened.

Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash