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What is a Nightmare?
Let’s start with a question which is very often a good start. What is a nightmare? A bad dream. Frightening imagination. Any fearful situation. All true. In fact, how do we tell when we are dreaming? Sometimes the boundaries of dream and awake are not easy to see. Interesting and true. The defined boundaries are…
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Blurred Boundaries
Dream experience seems to defy physics, but how did the dreaming mind come to be able to make up such seemingly illogical events as occur in our dreams? Memories of before this existence? It comes from another plane that doesn’t have the same restrictions? Basically yes to both statements. There is a grammar the mind…
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Nightmare Characters
Notice how time works in your dreams? Almost non existent. Because it’s non-existent, as we define it, even while we are awake. We think we have a dream at the end of the day while we sleep, but even viewed in waking world terms, that part of your brain that dreams still dreams while we…
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World of Experience
Neuroscience has discovered some very interesting things. We structure our memory like it was physical spaces. This is why when you walk through a door, you often forget why you were entering that room. Your memory is your house. But what is the difference between sensation and memory? How can you tell the difference? Sensation…
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Include the Whole Picture
Our world has three faces. A dreamy heaven where wishes are fulfilled. A nightmarish hell where guilt is punished and fear is rewarded with its expectations, and the bright and potentially blinding “real world.” Can you have the real world as we know it without the other two? What would happen if humans had no dreams?…
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Things that Scare Us
We have one world with three faces of experience or consciousness. We have one world, but one which can be said to exist at three different levels of awareness, and even if you understand everything and delude yourself about nothing, none of the levels will disappear. The reason being, just as our brain assembles what…
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Nightmare Awareness
Just as your body is an ecosystem, so is your mind, and besides impressions made on you by other organisms, you actually have semi-independent intelligences showing up in your dreaming experience as well. We aren’t as holistic as people convince themselves they are. Various regions of your own nervous system still center themselves and organize…
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Nightmares
Nightmares. I think we’ve all been having intense dreams recently. Perhaps due to the environmental balance as of late, the increased energy brought about from an early spring, and the more radical changes going on in our world. The beings that can enter our dreams, there must be some interesting ones. The oneiroi? They stalk dreams?…
Category: Nightmares
A deep seated sense that something just should be so, just shouldn’t be present or shouldn’t occur. The majority of dream related emotion is actually negative. While you sleep, your dreaming mind works out all the subtle little discomforts and confusions we condition ourselves to ignore while we are awake.
The things that scare us all relate to release, and there is a scary side to everything we experience. Anything that suggests shadow or void, emptiness of confusion, fills the realm of nightmares. You don’t have a choice about what is present in your nightmares. They have a reality all their own which actually should be comforting because it means they aren’t evidence of your insanity or some deep seated character flaw. Just like physical presences, they just exist, and like physical presences what that means to you is decided by you.
“Welcome to my nightmare. I think you’re going to like it. There’ll be some more when you come down.” Alice Cooper
“You are also caught with the fact that man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage.” Morris West