Terrible dreams are one of the consequences of prolonged stress, when in a dream we continue to experience traumatic events. However, healthy sleep is the basis of our life, we must try to restore it as soon as possible. A few simple techniques to get rid of nightmares.
Flashback technique
It is used by American psychotherapists who work with PTSD.
You invent a positive ending for a terrible dream and provoke it aloud. It is also advisable to write it down on a piece of paper or in your phone’s notes. Read aloud twice more before going to bed.
For example, a soldier, who was literally assembled in parts after the Ilovaysk boiler, constantly dreamed of terror, in which he escapes from the explosion and falls from the run into a huge pit. At this point, he always woke up in a cold sweat. This tormented him for several years: periodically, after anxiety, he had this dream.
Together with a psychotherapist, he changed the ending of sleep: he jumps not into a pit, but into a shallow pool (a fighter under two meters tall, but can not swim, although he loves water), with warm water and beautiful girls. And is there with pleasure. In a few days the dream passed and never came back.
Safety
In essence, this is an extension of the flashback technique. It is necessary to finish the dream in such a way that there is no danger in the dream at all.
For example, a girl dreams that a rapist is chasing her. She wakes up and thinks she ran away and it ended well. But then the brain remembers that it escaped this time, but not the next time. The ending would be more effective, in which the girl ran away from the rapist, and then looked closely and it turned out that it was her old friend who ran after her: he wanted to hug and talk, but she did not recognize and was scared.
You have to come up with your own plots, which you can easily believe in and which you will enjoy.
