14 Tips for Getting Rid of Nightmares

Sometimes the only dreams we remember are the ones we wish we could forget. Nightmares can be instructive, and most psychologists believe that they are a healthy part of life. But if you are plagued by repetitive nightmares and are losing sleep, sometimes changing your daily habits can reduce nightmare frequency. In general, nightmares can be caused by insufficient sleep, poor exercise and diet, and stress.  The tips below all are aimed at cultivating a healthier sleep and dream life, drawn from my ebook Enhance Your Dreamlife.

1. Don’t go to sleep angry or stressed out. Give yourself time to cool down.

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The Succubus Reconsidered: Sexuality in Sleep Paralysis

This piece about sexual spirit encounters and ghost rape is adapted from chapter 6 of my ebook Sleep paralysis: a dreamer’s guide.

The historic fears of succubi and incubi must be reconsidered in light of contemporary psychology.  As the medical community disregarded the narratives of sleep paralysis until David Hufford’s ground-breaking work in the 1970s, we would be making the same mistake if we chalk up the old tales of sexual demons to “merely legend.”

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How to Prevent False Awakenings

False awakenings are dreams that seem like waking life… until you get out of bed and fall down a bottomless chasm. True story. False awakenings can be frustrating, terrifying, and may even begin to impact your daily life, especially when they occur 5 or more times in a row.

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9 Ways to Wake Up From Sleep Paralysis

Sleep paralysis is the terrifying feeling of being held down after just waking up or going to sleep. You can’t move or scream, and sometimes this paralysis is accompanied with the certainty that someone –or something — is in the room. Quite simply, sleep paralysis is one of the most horrifying experiences in life, because we know we’re awake but can’t believe what appears to be happening to us.

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New Ebook: A Dreamer’s Guide to Sleep Paralysis

I’m excited to offer my second ebook: Sleep Paralysis: A Dreamer’s Guide. This 100+ page manual leads readers through the fear of sleep paralysis nightmares, and teaches how to safely explore the extraordinary dream realms of lucid dreaming, out-of-body experiences, and creative hypnagogia.

This ebook is also the first focused study ever published on how to deal with the Strangers: the creepy hallucinations that often accompany sleep paralysis in the form of ghosts, demons, and horrific monsters.

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Sleep Paralysis, Fear, and Spirituality

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Sleep Paralysis Treatment – Dreams of Being Held Down

Sleep Paralysis is a troubling sleep condition that is deeply misunderstood in our culture. Experienced by millions as an incubus attack or being “ridden by a witch,” sleep paralysis (SP) has biological causes that are related to sleep hygiene, stress, and insomnia.

In SP, the dreamer is aware of the body’s paralysis that normally comes with REM (dreaming) sleep.  This paralysis is what keeps us from acting out our dreams: a pretty important evolutionary skill that prevents us from injuring ourselves or our sleeping partners when we are dreaming about hunting tigers and bears.

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Lucid Nightmares – Submit Your Dream

I’m preparing for my upcoming lecture on lucid nightmares, coming up in three weeks in Chicago at the annual conference for the International Association for the Study of Dreams.

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Nightmares Linked with Multiple Suicide Attempts

A study from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden reports that suicidal patients are more likely to attempt to take their life again if they have nightmares following the first attempt. In fact, the data suggests that gender and psychiatric diagnosis is not a factor in these results.  From the original article,

“Those who were still suffering from nightmares after two months faced an even greater risk. These people were five times more likely to attempt suicide a second time,” says author of the thesis, Registered Nurse Nils Sj str m.

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Sleep Paralysis and Spirits

Are spirits real, or are they just irrational stories meant to explain things that science now explains better? This is the way the question of spirits is framed by many. According to many recent polls, belief in ghosts in the West hovers around 60%, and one British poll found that more people believe in ghosts than God. These statistics are then typically melded to reinforce the idea that “we hold irrational belief despite all the math we’ve done,” such as this statement from Live Science:

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