How to Shake Off a Bad Dream

Bad dreams don’t always end when we wake up

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

We’ve all had them. Bad dreams. They’re not quite nightmares where we wake up with a pounding heart, gasping for air. They’re more disturbing than frightening. These are the dreams where we wander in mazes and can’t get out, look for something we can’t find or identify, have been abandoned or betrayed by a loved one. Bad dreams can linger long after awakening. The after-effects follow us around like slimy shadows, making us feel disjointed, discombobulated, and unsettled. We become reluctant to go to bed at night for fear the dream will return, so we stay up and create a sleep deficit that actually contributes to disturbing dreams.

Anxiety after a disturbing dream is natural. Unlike daydreams where we can easily come out of our reverie, sleep dreams leave impressions on us that are similar to our experience of VR simulator games. According to Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology at Harvard School of Medicine and author of Pandemic Dreams, dreams seem real as we are dreaming them, and they leave a sense of having been real when they end.

How to recover from a bad dream

“A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read.” — The Talmud

The sooner we stop thinking of the dream as something that really happened, the faster we can shed its after-effects. We pray or meditate, use a mantra to calm down, or focus on our breathing. This stops rumination and helps rid us of the sense of unease or doom that we awoke with. If we refuse to relive the dream, we can more easily forget it. While this can help us shed the lingering pall from a dream, sometimes the memory of the dream is so pervasive, or the dream is so recurring, it may be prudent to figure out what it means.

We can use inquiring, journaling, or meditating to explore disturbing dreams and uncovering their meanings. Decoding them, especially recurring dreams, can end them. Experts advise that we look at the dream for its symbolic imagery and ask ourselves basic questions about the objects and events from the dream in an attempt to discover non-literal, alternate meanings. Dr. Barrett recommends viewing the elements of the dream as objects and exploring how we feel about…