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following comment on his living gargoyle dream, quoted earlier in this chapter:
I don t know the origin of the dream. Probably some pathological cause brought it on the first
time; but afterwards, when it was repeated on several occasions in the space of six weeks, it
was clearly brought back solely by the impressions it had made on me and by my instinctive
fear of seeing it again. If I happened, when dreaming, to find myself in a closed room, the
memory of this horrible dream was immediately revived; I would glance towards the door, the
thought of what I was afraid of seeing was enough to produce the sudden appearance of the
same terrors, in the same form as before. 20
I believe nightmares become recurrent by the following process: in the first place, the dreamer
awakens from a night-mare in a state of intense anxiety and fear; naturally, he or she hopes that
it will never happen again. The wish to avoid at all costs the events of the nightmare ensures
that they will be remembered. Later, something in the person s waking life associated with the
original dream causes the person to dream about a situation similar to the original nightmare.
The dreamer recognizes, perhaps unconsciously, the similarity and expects the same thing to
happen. Thus, expectation causes the dream to follow the first plot, and the more the dream
recurs, the more likely it is to recur in the same form. Look-^g at recurrent nightmares in this
way suggests a simple treatment: the dreamer can imagine a new conclusion for the dream to
weaken the expectation that it has only one possible outcome.
Veteran dreamworker Strephon Kaplan-Williams decribes a technique for redreaming the end
of a nightmare; he calls it dream reentry. The technique can be Practiced with any dream that
you feel unsatisfied with the outcome of, but it seems especially apt for recurrent nightmares, in
which you are stuck time after time with the same set of disturbing events.
Dream reentry is practiced in the waking state. People begin by selecting dreams to relive, then
come up with alternative ways of acting in the dreams to influence the progression of the events
toward more favorable or useful outcomes. They relive the dream in imagination,
incor-porating the new action, and continue to visualize being in the dream until they see the
result of their alternative behavior. Kaplan-Williams offers an example of dream reentry from
his own experience. He had dreamed: I I am in this house and there is something scary to
con-front. I don t want to do it and am all alone. I m quite afraid. I wake up. He resolves to
reenter the dream and i face the fear. In this case, he actually fell asleep as he was practicing the
file:///H|/KaZaA%20Lite/My%20Shared%20Folder/((lucid)%20dream...0Stephen--Exploring%20The%20World%20Of%20Lucid%20Dreaming.htm
reentry process, which added to the intensity of his experience:
This time I make myself enter the bathroom where the source of my fears seems to be. I am
afraid, so afraid that the flow of images stops. But through sheer will I make myself enter the
bathroom ready for anything, I think of taking my machete and thrashing around with it if I am
attacked. But I decide against this because I want to confront my fear by willing myself to stay
with the situation no matter what.... I am ready to face that which could overwhelm me and
exist with it rather than try to defeat it.
... When I do [enter the bathroom], there seems to be a hulking luminescent figure there. It does
not attack me but changes into a dwarf-like figure, long arms, roundish head, like Yoda. We
face each other. I have stayed with the situation. No attack comes. My fear goes away when I
experience what is there behind the door, and has been there so many years going back to
child-hood. What has been there behind every door and scary place is fear itself and my
inability to fully deal with it. 21
Several years ago, I used a similar approach with someone suffering from recurrent nightmares.
A man telephoned me asking for help. He feared going to sleep, because he might have that
terrible dream again. In his dream, he told me, he would find himself in a room in which the
walls were closing in, threatening to crush him. He would desperately try to open the door,
which would always be locked.
I asked him to imagine he was back in the dream, knowing it was a dream. What else could he
do? At first he was unable to think of anything else that could pos-sibly happen, so I modeled
what I was asking him to do. I imagined I was in the same dream and I visualized the walls
closing in. However, the moment I found the door locked, it occurred to me to reach into my
pocket where I found the key, with which I unlocked the door and walked out. I recounted my
imaginal solution and asked him to try again. He imagined the dream again this time he
looked around the room and noticed that there was no ceiling and climbed out.
I suggested to him that if this dream should ever recur, he could recognize it as a dream and
remember his so-lution. I asked him to call me if the dream came back, but he never did.
Unfortunately, we cannot be sure about what happened. But I think that having found some way
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