Contents

Introduction: Nightmares Demand a Response – Three different examples

1. What are Dreams? The Waking, Sleeping and Dreaming Worlds

2. Why do we Dream – and What for? Dreams and Mental Health

3. What are Nightmares? Ancient Myths and Neurobiological Insights

4. Dealing with Nightmares: Discovering, Exploring and Understanding Yourself

5. Nature as a Nightmare Motif: Natural Forces, Dangerous Animals and Plant Life

6. Human Beings as a Nightmare Motif: Aggressive People and Vulnerable People

7. Nightmare Motifs from Culture and Technology: When Objects Become Broken or Dangerous

Conclusion

Appendix 1: Index of key words in the nightmare motifs

Appendix 2: Understanding your own nightmare motifs

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Endnotes

About the Author

Introduction: Nightmares Demand a Response
– Three different examples

Nightmares are not unusual experiences: nearly one out of twenty people in Germany is plagued by nightmares on a regular basis. Not only adults, but children and adolescents as well, are affected by them.

If you are one of those affected: how do you feel when you awake from a nightmare – drenched in sweat, your heart racing, in a panic or with the feeling of a lead weight pressing on your chest? Do you try to forget the terrifying dream images as quickly as possible? Or, unable to escape the images of your nightmares, do you try to decipher their messages? How does a nightmare influence your behavior and your everyday life?

Nightmares can unsettle us – not only during the night, but also on the following day, leaving us feeling depressed, irritable or stressed. Understandably, we would prefer not to experience nightmares at all – and if they do occur, we want to shake them off as quickly as possible.

Yet how can we manage to be less troubled by nightmares? How should we deal with them?

If we view a nightmare as a disturbing, frightening or disconcerting question, our aim would be to find a satisfactory answer. Seen from this point of view, the wide variation of nightmares would correspond to a broad spectrum of questions and lead to a multitude of answers.

Small children often ask quite blunt questions: “Mommy is that man over there the devil?”, “Why are you so fat?” or “Why doesn’t the moon fall out of the sky?” Astonished children present adults with astonishing questions. They are curious, unbiased, and they pay no heed to conventions – just like our dreams. Once children enter school, the situation is reversed, and adults direct more questions at children in order to test their knowledge and abilities. While good pupils are more able to take this in stride, others fervently hope to be spared from their teachers’ questions. And even young schoolchildren begin to notice that questions cannot only be stimulating, but they may also be unpleasantly penetrating. Such questions seem to bombard them like missiles: they cause pain, injury or shame.

In a similar manner, nightmares can ruthlessly invade our consciousness and cause us to tremble or become speechless or petrified. However, once the initial shock is past, it is often possible to ask ourselves or our nightmares: “Why am I dreaming such terrible things? What does this have to do with my life and my relationships?” If we scrutinize the destructive force in the most interested and unprejudiced manner possible, we will seldom remain powerless; rather, we will discover answers. And experience has shown that a person who finds a coherent answer to her nightmares will be able to sleep better again.

Upon receiving his award, the Hungarian director Bence Flieg­auf – winner of the Silver Bear at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival – spoke incidentally about his own way of dealing with nightmares: “Whenever I wake up from a nightmare, I know that I need to make a film.” Bence Fliegauf has found his own personal response to his nightmares: for him, it is important to examine a subject – perhaps the focal point of his dream – using an artistic approach and thereby create a film. His nightmares seem to present him with a work order: in a way, they are his own very personal method of job creation, to which he devotes himself with earnest commitment and zeal.

In the late 1990s, Olympic high bar champion Andreas Wecker responded to his nightmares in a completely different way. He repeatedly woke up bathed in sweat, remembering nightmare images of himself sitting crippled in a wheelchair. After subsequently sustaining severe bruises and hematomas during a practice session on the high bar, he did not hesitate long in deciding to end his athletic career. His decision was met with some incomprehension on the part of his trainers and colleagues. Andreas Wecker responded to his nightmares with an existential choice which radically altered his future.1 Were Andreas Wecker’s decision and reaction the correct ones? – especially given the fact that no one will ever know whether a serious accident might have occurred if he had remained active as a professional athlete?

As soon as a series of nightmares comes to an end – that is, as soon as the dreamer’s soul has become calm – then he or she has generally found the “right answer.” For those of us on the outside, this is not always understandable, since we are not able to experience the impressive power and intensity of the menacing nightmare images. Each of us dreams for himself alone, and we can only tell other people about our dream experiences – but we cannot take them with us into our dream worlds in order to convince them of our images’ dramatic relevance first hand. Anyone who makes far-reaching decisions based on his or her nightmares is ultimately forced to fall back on his own subjective interpretation of the nightmare images. If he relies on his intuitive, instinctive feelings, or trusts in the collected knowledge of dreams and their interpretation which human beings have gathered for thousands of years, he will have useful tools for dealing constructively with his own nightmare images.

The psychiatrist Wanda Póltawska describes an alternative response to nightmares. Her nightmares always appeared at times when she was overworked and extremely exhausted. As soon as she allowed herself more time to rest, her nightmares disappeared again. However, many years earlier, she had a very different experience with her nightmares, which first occurred on the night of May 8, 1945. On that day, she had returned home from the Ravensbrück concentration camp and immediately began dreaming about her horrendous experiences in the camp. Because of these unbearable nightmares, she became increasingly afraid of going to sleep. In desperation, she took pencil and paper in hand. In the summer of 1945, after she had written down all of her terrible memories from her life in the camp, her nightmares promptly ceased.

Wanda Póltawska was once again able to sleep undisturbed, and in later years, her nightmares returned only at times when she had demanded too much of herself.2

Three people found individual responses to their nightmares which worked for each of them personally. They experienced the way in which horrific nocturnal images impose themselves unbidden on the sleeper, but also the way in which they disappear again as soon as their message has been deciphered.