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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Book Review: Dark Intrusions by Louis Proud

Dark Intrusions by Louis Proud is a much needed investigation into the paranormal aspects of sleep paralysis visions. Proud digs deep and views SP within the philosophical and literary traditions of spiritualism, mediumship, ghost hauntings and channeling. Hands down, it’s pretty much the spookiest book I’ve read this year.

Proud is a sleep paralysis experiencer himself, so his narrative is grounded in his first-hand knowledge of what it feels like to be held down while you sleep by various unsavory entities. This is the classic sleep paralysis encounter, recounted by millions around the world in many cultures as the old hag, the incubus effect, and being ridden by the witch. Proud uses his experience as a touchstone as he reviews the connecting threads of SP with the fortean literature.

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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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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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The Link Between Depression and Dreams

Sleep plays a major role in mood regulation; that’s a truism that is behind every mother’s call for “time to go to bed!”    But while the links between dreams and depression are well documented, the role of dreams in maintaining mental health is still one of the most confusing components in the function of sleep.

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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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REM is not the Man Holding Us Down

It’s been roughly 54 years since a young graduate student discovered and named REM sleep, which is commonly known as the “dream state.” While it is true that dreaming can occur in all of the sleep states (as cognition, mental imagery, and uncanny kinesthetics), it is REM that grants us the long dramatic dreamy narratives that we usually remember in the mornings.

REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement, and was named by young E. Aserinsky because, in this sleep state, every voluntary muscle in the body is in motor paralysis, except for the eyes. They roll back and forth wildly while the rest of the body remains frozen.

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Nightmares and Sleep Paralysis

Gyrus from Dreamflesh made this connection between false awakenings and sleep paralysis: in both of these altered states, we feel like we are “awake” and aware of our surroundings. In a false awakening, this certainty of “awakeness” turns out to be a lucid dream about where we are actually sleeping. In sleep paralysis, we also feel awake but the situation is a little more complicated. Here our self-awareness is active and we may even have eyes open, but our bodies are still under the paralysis of REM sleep. The more we struggle, the more it feel like we are being “held down.”

I wrote about the creepiness of night terrors about a year ago on my culture shock blog, so I won’t go on at length here. Even though the REM paralysis is probably what is happening on the “exterior” levels of our reality, we really can’t reduce the entire experience of night terrors to biomechanics. After all, many people throughout history have described intense visitation dreams that follow from the initial feeling that “someone else is in the room.” These night visitors have ranged from dead relatives to benign ghostly apparitions to scary demonic entities to figures of light and peace.

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