How to Leave a Nightmare
Tips from a lucid dreamer that can be applied in the waking life
When I was really young, I was prone to nightmares. I would wake up crying, frozen in place with the occasional wet bed. In the second grade, my mother blamed it on the fact that I regularly consumed the Goosebumps series. They were almost always about either being lost or being chased.
I remember several repeated dreams of me hiding under my father’s home office desk, looking away because if I couldn’t see the monster in my dream, it couldn’t see me either — right?
I found that this didn’t always work unfortunately and I would feel that instant moment of extreme fear followed by the sudden opening of your eyes to the lonely darkness and silence of the night.
Over the years of my childhood, I found that there were ways I could regain some control in my dreams through the wonders of lucid dreaming. I used my imagination to configure tools, pathways, or new concepts that could alter the plotline of the story. I learned to feel when the dream was going south and try to alter the course of the story. And eventually, I found one, almost foolproof, way I could always escape a dream. Death.
I honed the ability to find anything in my dream that could simulate either death or falling and as soon as I felt that recognizable dread crawl into the dreamscape I immediately found a staircase, cliff, or building and threw myself off it to force myself awake. It even got to the point where occasionally I could just simulate the feeling without taking any “physical action” in the dream.
But this didn’t always work. During one of the most difficult times in my waking life, I experienced constant nightmares. I found that if I was unable to get a “clean death” in my dream I only woke up within the nightmare again. The setting would slightly change as if to gaslight me into thinking it was okay. Only in this round, the feeling of dread came upon me faster than before and it was much much harder to force myself to wake up.
I suppose this is why I felt I understood the movie Inception so much. The concepts of death, falling, and totems were already familiar to me.
So why am I telling this story to you?
Sometimes life can reflect our dreams the way the dream world reflects reality. And sometimes tools and tricks can carry throughout both.
That difficult time I mentioned previously? That was like a living nightmare. And I escaped it. How?
Death.
Not literally. But I went through the same sort of death that falling in a dream feels like. Where you abandon all logic, all reason, all beliefs — and you suspend yourself into what you don’t know for certain is better for you but you know for sure it not your nightmare. It’s a sense of trust that you handoff into the darkness when you wake up in the middle of the night because you have no other option.
I feel that sometimes that is what is needed in life as well. Where reality feels odd. Where you feel crazy and look around and your daily life is glazed. Not all nightmares are full of clear-cut monsters. Some of them can even be the subtle almost eternal sense of something being off.
So let’s say we start to realize that maybe we are living in a not-so-favorable dream. A twilight zone-esque uncanny one. An uncomfortable one. A horrible one with monsters and mankind alike. How can we wake up?
In life sometimes we hear wording like “making the jump”, “diving in”, “starting anew”. These are examples of in reality deaths. There is a level of absolute surrender to the fear of unknown change and transformation. For example, people who start a new life in a new country experienced a sort of death of the life they led previously.
Whatever you feel is that sense of falling, that scary uncertain pathway that you don’t know if it’s better but you need to leave the current place you are in — that might be your pathway out. It’s interesting how what we know is frightening (falling) is the key to leaving something also frightening (uncertain change).
This is vague and conceptual on purpose because each individual has their own unique nightmare. Your pathway out might look different than someone else. It could be leaving a toxic relationship. Quitting a job that doesn’t bring you joy. Committing to your hobby as a full-time job. All scary stuff when you don’t know what’s on the other side.
I want to talk a bit about that one occurrence where death in a dream didn’t work. Where my clever plan to escape the dread and horror was not quite clever enough. I could “simulate” the feeling of falling to wake myself up. The problem with simulation is that it’s just that — it’s not the real act of falling. There was also desperation and in a way a sort of lack of conviction caused by the fear that made me sloppy. I woke up in the same nightmare 7 times. The mind is an amazing and scary thing.
I’m mentioning this because sometimes our efforts to escape are not fully sincere. Taking a real jump in life is absolutely scary and full of uncertainties. We mostly believe in the jump we want to take but still, try to look back towards what we are leaving. After all, the nightmare you are in is at least the one you know. There is comfort in the familiar.
An example: You are in a toxic relationship that you know you have to leave. But you have so much history and in the past maybe you had a great connection. Instead of leaving for good, you take a few months break, or when leaving you say things like “maybe in the future once xx happens”. That is not a “clean death”.
Life is complicated. It’s hard to know when, where, and how high to jump. Sometimes that little jump just isn’t enough to shock you into waking up and you end up needing a bigger one. And sometimes we have to do exactly what is the scariest thing in a nightmare to do — turn around and give our monster a face.
If you feel you are in any kind of nightmare perhaps these steps can help you escape.
- Realize you have the power to leave
- Analyze an action that resembles the feeling of falling. It’ll feel scary but you’ll know it's a way out.
- Surrender completely to the fear of taking that action and be sincere.
- Jump
Remember, even though I was a lucid dreamer, it took me a while to recognize when my dream turned south and how to hone what counted as a jump. It’s practice. Eventually, you’ll get better at recognizing when to leave and surrendering to that fear of falling, and over time the steps won’t seem so daunting.
This might seem heavy to some readers, but I talk about this because I want others to know, nightmares exist in both waking and unconscious life for many people out there. Some nightmares might need a little more help to escape from. That first jump becomes much scarier and more difficult to make.
And if any of you reading need help to escape an extra tough waking nightmare, know that you are not crazy and you are absolutely not alone. You do not deserve to stay in a place that makes you feel unsafe, afraid, and unhappy.
If you feel your way out from a nightmare might be the path of making a call:
Crisis Hotline: Text “Home” to 741741
National Suicide Prevention: 800–273–8255
National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1–800–799–7233
National Deaf Domestic Violence Hotline: 1–855–812–1001
National LGBTQIA Hotline: 1-888–843–4564
