Posted on 04/14/2005 3:45:01 PM PDT by thenightmarehero
Dreams and Nightmares An examination on better dreaming
By Amin Emilio Aun Joven
I grant this manuscript to the public domain.
Preface
My intention in writing this book is to improve the quality of your dreams. This book is theoretical in its approach to counteracting the problems of nightmares. It is up to you to prove the theories in this manuscript correct and know them as truth by practice and experimentation. I have come to realize that the entities described in religions of old: the devils, the demons, the antichrists, and the dajjals, all point to the same entity, the nightmare. Nightmares happen to us in waking as well as sleeping dreams. It is up to you to take what I teach you and apply it as best you can in your dreams. No matter what you think, dreams and nightmares affect our lives at a spiritual level that in turn affects us at the physical level. Nightmares can affect your work life, your composure, your outward look on life, your emotional and characteristic integrity. To counteract the effects of nightmares is not to ignore them and refuse to have them, but to actually combat the nightmares.
Amin Aun
“For nothing is secret that will not be revealed, nor anything hidden that will not be known and come to light.” - 8:17 Luke
Chapter 1: Dreams and Nightmares
Some people would let you believe that dreams and nightmares have no real value, that their underlying meaning or the actions that happen in them have no real effect or bearing on your living life. This is not true. Dreams and nightmares are what affect your spirit, and in turn your body and mind. To forsake the importance of dreams and nightmares is to forsake your spirit itself, for without the spirit the body cannot survive. The simple thing that distinguishes dreams from nightmares is that dreams are more pleasant and uplifting than nightmares. Nightmares are mainly focused around your own destruction and corruption, while dreams are focused more on the salvation of others and yourself. There are dreams where you find love, where you battle against the forces of evil and win, where you enjoy art, where you see things that no one has yet seen. There are nightmares where you are coerced into doing horrible acts of violence against the innocent, where you are tortured and killed, where your mind hears insane loud voices trying to drive you mad, where you kill yourself, where you see yourself being eaten away by disease or burned alive. The easiest way to understand dreams and nightmares is to interpret them in a way that we can understand them, so I ask all of you who read the rest of this book to imagine, just imagine, that dreams and nightmares represent people, maybe people that you have met or haven’t met. If we are to assume that dreams and nightmares represent people, then there are only three classifications that subdivide both categories:
Nightmares:
1)Pushers To have nightmares that push you is to have nightmares in which you do, say and think things that are uncharacteristic of your character, sometimes without you realizing it. You imagine people as being other people; you see enemies as friends and friends as enemies. You are made to feel and see things that would cause you to despair, such as torture and death. 2)Tormentors To have nightmares that torment you is to have nightmares in which you are angered by a voice that pretends to be your own, your anger is what kills you, sometimes you get so enraged in these type of dreams that you imagine killing yourself or killing innocent people, just so you can be rid of what torments you. 3) Diseasers To have nightmares that disease you is to have nightmares in which you imagine a person giving you a sickness, where you are made to believe that you are dying or have been given a fatal disease. You may sometimes see yourself being burned alive by another person, fall apart and decay slowly, or see yourself in the future as dying of a sickness in real life. Dreams:
1)Healers To have dreams that heal you is to have dreams in which you feel bliss and comfort, often at the arms of a member of the opposite sex. These types of dreams lend themselves to sexual fantasies and cuddling. 2)Warriors To have warrior dreams is to have dreams in which you fight against the forces of evil and conquer them. You imagine yourself as an invincible warrior as you fight and slay your opponents. 3)Visionaries To have visionary dreams is to have dreams in which you are inspired by images that others have never seen before, and are inspired to create art in real life. These types of dreams lend themselves well to visualizing the future. The classic quote of art imitates life exemplifies this. With visionary dreams you are coerced to create art that in turn can become reality with technology or fate.
All of these dreams and nightmares have the capacity to interact in your dreams as if they were real people. The dreams and nightmares are able to talk to you, touch you, fight you. One of the hardest things that happen as you get older is distinguishing which dreams feature you as a character and which are just visionary dreams, that is dreams that see while asleep that feature other people or characters.
Chapter 2: Brain Wiring
Brain wiring is important in determining what types of dreams and nightmares you’re susceptible to. There are only three classifications that you need to be aware of that distinguishes all the people on earth: left-brained dominants, right brained dominants, and equal brained dominants. Every person uses both lobes of their brains to some extent, but most people specialize themselves whether through biology or lifestyle to use one side of their brain more than the other. The following classifications that I list and their accompanying advantages and disadvantages are not absolute; there are always exceptions.
Left brained dominant people
The left side of the brain is devoted to logical, rational computation and problem solving ability. It is wired to control the right side of the body. This lobe interprets stimulus with a reality based approach. People who are more left brained dominant than right brained dominant are oriented more towards truth.
Disadvantages of being left brained dominant in your dreams
People with a dominance in left brained activity have less creative ability in their dreams, meaning that they are less able to think abstractly subconsciously and unconsciously to solve problems that present themselves in dreams and nightmares. Another problem with being left brained dominant is trying to apply the laws of physics of reality in your dreams. The realm of dreams and nightmares is fantasy and should never be bound by the laws of physics. Still left brained dominants have an instinctual desire to make rational every aspect of dreaming. Another disadvantage is that left brained dominants see themselves only as they are in real life in their dreams, that is if they wish to dream of themselves as a super hero, they will see their face on and not the face of the super hero that they are mimicking. This is a disadvantage when having nightmares because it does not allow flexibility in your actions; left brained dominants will believe that they are bound by their bodies in real life when they dream, and that they cannot mimic other abilities of larger than life characters that are presented in art.
Advantages of being left brained dominant in your dreams
Left brained dominants have the advantage of having more rational dreams, they will see characters and situations as they really are. Their minds will try to interpret the dream in a realistic manner. There is a greater sense of spirituality with being left brained dominant; you are likely to be more inclined to believe in god and belong to a religion. The greatest advantage of left brained dominants is that they are able to interpret symbols in dreams better than right brained dominants that reflect solutions and problems in real life, allowing for increased problem solving ability in real life with the usage of dreams.
Right brained dominant people
Right brained dominant people are more inclined to creative problem solving and interpreting stimulus in a fantasy based manner. Free association is a trait of right brained dominants. Right brained dominants are more inclined towards lying and the reversal of truth. The right lobe controls the left side of the body.
Disadvantages of being right brained dominant in your dreams.
Right brained dominant people are more inclined to irrational dreams. Their abstract thought abilities lends to misinterpreting the real world, and towards an inclination to have nightmares. Chaotic thinking can result if the right lobe is overstimulated. Chaotic thinking can be instigated by biological and environmental factors. Narcotics and alcoholism are environmental factors, so too is trauma to the left side of the brain which overcompensates with an increase in the right side activity. A biological factor that can instigate chaotic thinking occurs in homosexuality and bisexuality. Excessive hormone stimulation during pregnancy can lead to children with an inclination towards a homosexual or bisexual lifestyle. Hormone stimulation is a result of excessive stress or sexual intercourse. When the mother is stimulated, hormones not only go through the mother’s mind but the fetus’s as well, affecting the brain chemistry and wiring. The key factor in preventing excessive hormone stimulation is to prevent over-exertion and emotional extremities, abstinence during the entire period of pregnancy, and avoidance of harmful chemicals such as alcohol and cigarettes. There is also a lower sense of spirituality that results from being right brained dominant. Because of the ability of right brained dominants to alter the stimulus of the environment in dreams and in real life, some right brained dominants may have delusions of grander because of their abilities in dreams and a lower respect for god. Some may even believe themselves to be gods in their dreams.
Advantages of being right brained dominant in your dreams
Right brained dominant people enjoy a greater ability in artistic talent. Their creativity is rooted in their instinctual desire to do and see what has never been. This lends itself well in entertainment avenues such as movie making and song writing. Right brained dominants also enjoy a pivotal advantage over left brained dominants, which is the ability to see themselves as different people or characters in whole in their dreams. This role playing ability allows them to look and impersonate other individuals. Carl Jung called this ability “masking” which is to have an outward appearance that differs from the personal, private self. Masking can also be done in dreams when right brained dominants take on the form and functions of other people or characters. Their face in real life is not necessarily the same face that they have in the dream world. They can even make themselves appear as a member of the opposite sex in their dreams.
Types of people who are left and right brained dominant
Professions that involve creativity and public speaking are prime locations for right brained dominants. Right brained people are visible in politics as well as in the movie industry. The easiest way to determine right brained dominants is to see which set of people project their flaws on others, which set of people are more hypocritical in the long run regarding what they say and what they do, and which set of people have a loose sense of values. Professions that involve reality based physical work and logical thinking are more inclined to be populated with left brained dominant individuals. Politics is also populated with such people, for without rational thought in government decisions and legislation, anarchy would ensue. You can see which set of people exemplify this quality by their actions, usually left brained dominant people in politics have a greater sense of integrity, hold on to traditional values, and are respectful of religions and god. Sports is also populated with left brained dominant individuals, because sports as well as other jobs are where reality based computation and hand-eye coordination come into play. The majority of people on the planet are left brained dominant because we have to function and move in the real world. We only sleep six to eight hours a day, but we are awake for the other sixteen to eighteen hours. To determine which people are of a dominant type, one must look at a person’s body language. Ask yourselves what type of body language distinguishes a homosexual and bisexual from a heterosexual, what types of body language distinguishes a basketball player from an art director or cinematographer?
Equal brained dominant people
Equal brained dominant individuals are undoubtably the next stage in human evolution. Their brain chemistry and wiring allows for better communication and self-learning with both sides of the brain. Equal usage of both lobes allows for better ambidextrous functionality with physical and mental abilities on both sides of the brain and body. The key component in allowing for both lobes to be balanced is the physical connection between them that relays signals, the Corpus Callosum. The Corpus Callosum is a thick layer of neurons that acts as a connector between the left and right lobe of the brain. It is possible with evolution that there will be a vertical growth and expansion of this part of the brain that will allow for better communication between both lobes. The end result being that what is separate will be united. Integrity reinforcement of mental components such as speech and rote memory may be done by having the brain copy the same functionality of one component from one lobe to the opposite lobe. All the advantages of the left and right brained dominants would be carried over as traits of equal brained dominant individuals, though with fewer disadvantages. Improved energy consumption of the brain is a possibility since the brain would be able to determine better which component is most capable of handling the task at hand in the real and dream world. It is also likely that with balanced usage of both lobes, equal brained dominant individuals can control their dreams better than right or left brained dominants.
Neural Integrity
Neural integrity is accomplished by performing daily mental task, by using logic, reasoning, free association, using your imagination, recalling memories, and speaking in your mind with thoughts. The grey matter of the brain in a sense is a muscle but instead of flexing this gray matter with movements, we flex it with thoughts. Thoughts are memories and fictitious ideas as well as verbal communication with yourself on a mental level. In order to continually exercise your mind you must speak with your thoughts to increase your rote memory and stimulate other areas of the brain. Earworms are an instinctual method of doing this.
The role of earworms
Earworms are songs that are played in your mind, sometimes controlled by you and sometimes not. You hear the music in your head by way of your rote memory, which is the memory used to remember and repeat phrases. The rote memory component of your mind is situated near the top of your brain and in front of the center of your skull. The reason that they have this name is that the majority of people do not know how to control the singing in their heads. Some people try to listen to the music being played to have it stopped, while others try to listen to other music. The key to terminating uncontrollable earworms is willing yourself to listen to a song or melody of your conscious choosing in your mind. Uncontrollable earworms are symbolic of the control that nightmares wish to take from your mind to attack you, while natural earworms that are willed by you when you do not experience stress are the instinctual desire to exercise portions of the mind to keep it from atrophying.
Music’s role in stimulating the mind
The Mozart effect has been well documented in psychology. It involves the neural stimulation of the brain by way of music without lyrics. To amplify the effect that occurs from this, one must visualize their mind in the same way that you would visualize the lighted buttons on the electronic game Simon Says. With each different button a different tone is heard. Using the same analogy you can imagine different areas of your brain being lighted up by different melodies and notes that you hear. After you consciously make an effort to imagine this happening to your mind, your subconscious and all lower levels of your psyche will be able to take over the task automatically.
Other forms of mental stimulation
Other ways that you can stimulate the mind are by recalling memories whether visual or audible, using free association and direct association. Free association stimulates the right side of the brain, while direct association stimulates the left side. Memory recollection is best achieved by remembering what excites the mind; memorable scenes and quotes from art create the greatest stimulus because they entertain us. Using memories that give the greatest emotional response allows for more than one area of the brain to be stimulated. Once you have done this exercise voluntarily, your mind will eventually be able to do it automatically. Free association is accomplished by going on a tangent of thought, meaning holding on to one aspect, idea or word that you were currently thinking of and remembering something related to that one aspect. Direct association is remembering something that directly corresponds to the entire thought. For auditory recollection this direct link may be a phrase that though awkward in tone, sounds like an appropriate response to your current thought. In direct association it is not important the context or tone of the speech, but more importantly what is said in the speech that you recall that makes it a direct association. For free association it is otherwise; the tone and context of the speech are important. The quote “Its not what you say but how you say it” comes to mind when summing up auditory recollection using free and direct association; “what you say” refers to direct association, while “how you say it” refers to free association. For visual recollection, free association is used to recall memories from art, where as direct visual association is accomplished by remembering actions from one’s experiences.
Free association example: “I hope the car is all right.” -> Remembering scenes from movies where car flies or escapes danger. (The Last Starfighter, Back to the Future)
Direct association example: “I hope the car is all right.” -> Remembering that the engine needs maintaince. Using direct quotations from art that correctly reflect the situation.
Chapter 3: The Spirit and Will Power
Your spirit is manifested and represented in your dreams and nightmares. Sometimes this is a literal representation and you look like yourself, while other times this representation is skewed and you look like a different person, or a character that you enjoy emulating and imagining yourself as. The spirit is the visual representation of who your really are and includes all levels of your conscious nesses.
The four layers of the spirit and the awareness in each
There are four layers to your psyche, each interfacing with a different level of your spirit mind and body, and each with its own unique level of awareness. The deeper the level, the farther the awareness at that level is from the physical body. The consciousness is the highest level and the one that makes you aware of yourself when awake. You sense your body and what is outside of it. On this level you interact with your environment and those around you. This is called physical awareness. The next layer is the subconsciousness. This layer of your spirit makes you aware of your inner self, the organs and cells of your body. It is the level of your being that knows how to interface with the biological mechanisms within you, how your spirit communicates with the mind and in turn the mind communicates with the body. The unconsciousness is the layer that makes you aware of other entities in your dreams and allows you to interact with them. Carl Jung called this the collective unconsciousness. Being aware of things beyond your reach is what this layer of the spirit is responsible for. The lowest layer of your psyche and the hardest to be consciously aware of is the god-consciousness. This layer makes you aware of God and allows you to be inspired by him. Inspiration and original ideas stem from this layer of the spirit.
Awareness of the self within each level of awareness
The most important thing to realize about all layers of your spirit is that each consciousness is as aware as you are while awake. They are all connected to one another and therefore interact together. To realize that your conscious nesses are aware and can understand you is the first step to becoming a whole person and fulfilling your full potential. The next step is to communicate with each layer of your self accordingly so that you can reach that potential. The trickle down effect, so named for how rain drops trickle down a window, is one way in which you can will your mind and all lower layers of your self to understand you. To do this you must speak verbally what you wish your mind and body to accomplish, a task or command that you have set as a goal to complete. First you speak out loud in private what you want to do a couple of times, then you speak the exact same thing repeatedly in loud thought, then in lower and lower thought. This allows for each layer of your psyche to be exposed to the command at an increased rate, not just letting what is said in the consciousness to filter down to the lower layers. The reduction in volume in your thoughts represents the depth of each layer, the lower the thought, the deeper the layer. When you speak your command or task that you wish to complete in all layers of your spirit, you allow for all layers to understand you and for a quicker reaction time between making your wishes known to your mind and body and having them fulfilled.
Schizophrenia: the awareness disease?
Some have wondered what role the mental disorder schizophrenia plays in the mind. Most acknowledge that it involves a sort of “brain overload” that impairs the individual from clear and controlled thought. It is possible that schizophrenia is a heightened sense of awareness at all layers of the spirit, most notably at the unconsciousness and god-consciousness. Whether this disorder will develop itself to register more positive traits through the advent of better medication or the evolutionary vertical expansion of the Corpus Callosum is still unknown. Regardless the symptoms of the disorder coincide with the theories of awareness presented in this chapter. It should be interesting to see what readers who suffer from schizophrenia think concerning whether or not the explanation that I have outlined in this paragraph brings new light on this genetic and environmentally induced phenomena.
Will Power and how it pertains to the spirit and dreaming
Increasing your will power increases your control of your psyche in waking and sleeping dreams. The main ingredient in increasing will power is assertiveness, the belief and dedication to what we are doing regardless of rebuttal or criticism. Right brained dominants have an advantage over left brained dominants regarding this because of their refusal to limit themselves to rules and laws in dreams, especially the laws of physics. This equates to a form of indirect assertiveness that is always there but is not necessarily developed. To develop will power is to consciously develop assertiveness, to grow it through practice and learned skill. You can manipulate your body better in sleep with greater will power. Not only does will power offer an avenue for greater control, but it enlarges your spirit as well. Use the trickle down effect to speak to your spirit at all layers of awareness; will your spirit to force your mind to perform new and different mental functions. In this way you can achieve greater stability and balance in your thoughts and actions.
Passion, Rationality, and Self Control
Passion, rationality, and self control are symbolic of the three forces that act on and control your spirit in dreams. Passion features all emotions from love to rage. You use ingenuity to guide you when you use passion, the ability to disregard rules and take a different path that has never been attempted. Rationality features logic, wisdom and understanding. You use experience to guide you when you use rationality. And self control is represented as the force that interacts and balances both rationality and passion, the mediator that keeps both sides in check with each other. Self control is represented in physical terms by the Corpus Callosum of the brain, the connection between the left and right lobe. All three forces affect the size of your spirit and how easily you can control your dreams. To have too much passion is to give in to the madness of the mind, your dreams will be more chaotic and the movements of your dream self will be harder to control. To have too much rationality is to not allow yourself to move without limits, you will not be able to solve problems creatively that arise while awake or asleep. Without passion, you cannot excel, without rationality, you cannot control your madness, and without self control, you cannot find inner balance. Have all three in the right amounts and your life is bliss. Have all three in the right amounts and you will excel in your dreaming.
Chapter 4: Nightmares in Depth
It is possible that nightmares are one of the main causes for many mental and physical ailments. Cancer, organ failure, stroke, and abnormal psychology can all have their foundations traced back to nightmares. Sometimes it is what we don’t see that is the most real. We sometimes feel pain in a particular organ or region of our body without prior reason or medical condition, we have an abrupt and sudden headache, a pressure on a certain region of our mind, or we feel that our brain tissue snaps and explodes, liquefying and killing off vital mental functions. My intention in this chapter is to give a symbolic understanding using the concept of nightmares to explain these occurrences that are usually attributed only to the physical and mostly never to the spiritual. Nightmares fabricated from your own mind usually cannot hurt you. But nightmares with individuals represented in real life that you have or have not met can affect you in negative ways because your mind registers it as your spirit being hurt by another and so affects the body according to how the spirit is injured in the dream.
Types of Nightmares
Pushers
Pushers, they’re all around, they think they own this world. They don’t know jack, because without their influence they got nothing to hack. They try to feed on the innocent of life. They’re living a lie if they think they can do that without being seen by our eyes. They try to push you to do things you wouldn’t, say things you wouldn’t, feel things you wouldn’t, see and hear things that you wouldn’t, all while making their intentions as subtle and unseen as possible.
Sincerity is their disguise as well as a loud voice, which they can’t hide. They always want to speak to you while trying not to get noticed. They want you to look at them without remembering who they are; that’s when you’ll know.
There’s one thing that they can’t do without giving themselves away. They can only stand behind you, because in front they have no sway. Once you turn around you’ll recognize them for what they are. They’re the ones who want to screw with your mind and are always trying to get you to do what they want.
Never trust a loud voice from the back alleys trying to sell you stuff you shouldn’t believe. Always go to the source, not who or what they make you feel is the real deal. Always know the truth.
When you are having dreams where you are being pushed you see yourself in your dreams whether awake or asleep doing things that you would not normally be doing; malicious acts against yourself and loved ones in the most extreme cases. You may find yourself doing things out of character in more subtle cases. You could see horrible acts performed on your person or on others. Sometimes you may see enemies as friends and friends as enemies. Stress and mental trauma can result from this, even physical death. The actual cause for pusher dreams is negative experiences or people in real life. The events in your waking life are reflected and represented in your dreams and nightmares. Your body language and your manner of speech can also be affected by pusher nightmares. Sadly we cannot always avoid the negatives that life has to offer us, but we can confront and control such negatives in the realm of dreams.
Tormentors
Tormenters are demons who spread their madness with their voices inside your head.
They’ll try to take away your true voice and leave you in a state of madness.
They try to make you hear them, listen to them, obey them, respect them; they deserve none of that.
Control and emotions are their weapons. They judge you as if their voice were yours, telling you that everything that you don’t do for them is wrong. They’ll try to make you feel emotions that you shouldn’t. They’ll try to drain you of your passion, for without your passion they’re dead.
Keep your cool in the heat of battle; let them get angry not you. Take away their passion and yours from them. Drive them mad instead of you.
Listen to the voices of reason, understanding, wisdom, knowledge, and sanity. Never listen to the voices of emotion or madness.
There is only one true voice, and it’s your own not anyone else’s. Don’t let them separate your true self from you. You know who you are.
When you have dreams that torment you, you hear voices where asleep or awake that try to drive you mad. They hinder your ability to think, speak or do anything, and try to make you lose your will power. These types of nightmares excite your emotions to cause you to destroy yourself with them. Abnormal psychology can result from this as well as death. The chief cause of tormentors in real life is negative automatic thoughts. Automatic thoughts are thoughts that happen without reason that are based on your in rooted core beliefs, the beliefs that you were brought up with. Uncontrollable automatic thoughts are what cause your mind to lose self control and spiral into madness.
Diseasers
Diseasers are monsters that carry a special power, the power to inflect sickness and death. They’ll try to drain the life force out of you and leave you without strength.
They hate light and water, the two things that breed life. If they hate them then you know who they are. Give them what they hate the most and you will stop their sickness from infecting you and destroy them as well.
Cast away the binds that wish to hold your spirit to them, then you will be free. They try to grasp you with their hands, but without their hands they cannot inflict their vermin on your spirit. Their touch is deadly to them in the right spot.
Be free from those that shy away from life, be free from those that exist to end it with death. Know who the diseasers are by how they react to life, for in the presence of life they have no power.
When you have dreams that disease you, you imagine yourself dying and withering away without the aid of light or water, your nightmares show you in terrible pain and anguish. Poor emotional and physical health results from this as well as death. The chief cause of diseaser nightmares is believing that you are sick and not knowing that you are not.
How to counteract nightmares
There are many avenues available to confront the problems presented by nightmares. One way is to increase your will power by assertiveness training. There are several self help books available on this subject. Another is willing yourself to interact in your dreams with other characters that are in it and stop malicious acts against your person and others. Do not just be an onlooker looking at yourself, take action. Another still is to be exposed to tranquil nature and low passion in your dreams. Sexual fantasies and dreams where you experience love are an avenue for relief from nightmares. Sexual intercourse plays a role in allowing for tranquil dreams to occur instead of nightmares. And the most pivotal aspect to confronting nightmares is to never lose control of yourself or your emotions when dreaming.
Why some people remember dreams and nightmares and others do not
Your subconsciousness and unconsciousness act to automatically protect you from unpleasant stimulus while you sleep, therefore they blackout your memory of whatever nightmares you had. Your subconsciousness and unconsciousness are in a sense ignoring the problem posed by bad dreams. Therefore you have to make a conscious choice to confront the problems and situations presented by nightmares. Making a conscious choice to confront nightmares is the first step to achieving control of your dreams.
Chapter 5: Dream Fighting
Fighting
When I move I don’t just see what is in front of me, I see what is behind me, to my sides, to my front, to my top, to my bottom.
When you move, do not just strike at one place, strike at two or many places.
When you move left move right at the same time, when you think left think right at the same time, when you fight one way fight every way at the same time. When you attack in one direction attack in the opposite direction, attack in many directions, attack in all directions.
Be creative in your techniques, for the greatest technique you can learn to master is to be without technique.
We have now reached the most important chapter of this manuscript. Many have wondered how you confront the problems presented by nightmares. If you imagine nightmares as representing people from reality, then you can make the association that as people you can fight them, even kill them in your sleep. This is done by keeping in mind three aspects of your spirit that must always be in check: passion, rationality, and self control.
How to use passion, rationality and self control
When you fight against a nightmare you must have passion, passion is what gives you the will to kill or inflict harm on those that wish to inflict harm on you. Passion is subdivided into many levels of emotion ranging from love to hate to the extreme of madness. Madness is expressed in dreams by chaotic thinking and movements, which the nightmares usually perform. Everyone but the nightmares has the potential to use both the left and right side of their brains equally with practice and learned skill. What you must realize is that the will to do this is there, it is just clouded by the darkness and the lack of understanding that many people have regarding sleep. One should never succumb to total madness to confront the madness of nightmares but practice controlled madness. Controlled madness can best be symbolized by the analogy of a kindergarten student coloring inside a circle template with his crayon on a piece of paper. The movements inside the template are chaotic, but they are controlled by the template itself, so that when the template is removed, a pattern of a circle can be seen on the drawing paper. Controlled madness means having method to madness, that your movements in the dream are not without purpose, that your objective is not without reason and sanity. One must have controlled madness and sanity if they are to avoid and survive the chaos that nightmares harbor. Another aspect that people must have is rationality, this is best exemplified in truth and lies. Nightmares are incapable of real truth, for nightmares come from the right side of the brain. We all have the capacity for lying, but when you interact with a nightmare, you will realize that their dialogue in dreams is full of fallacy. In order to confront a nightmare in the realm of ideas, you must recognize who in the darkness is a nightmare. If we are to carry the metaphor that nightmares represent people, then you must also realize that whenever you hear a voice in your dreams that speaks half truths and lies, that it is a nightmare. Nightmares come to inflict pain on your spirit, whichever of the three types they may be. To fight the nightmares when you cannot see them is to know who they are and what they represent. Imagine that nightmares are represented also by automatic thoughts as previously stated. You must strike back at any thought that is not of you, meaning that it is out of character and it is full of fallacy. When you are having nightmares there will be an abundance of this, the nightmares will try to make you think that they are you. Do not fall into such a trap. Nightmares are separate entities from your spirit. They come with a two fold purpose always, that being to control and destroy your mind. They achieve control by having you believe their lies and half truths. When you are having a nightmare in a waking dream you may experience a tremendous amount of free association memory recollection. This is indicative of a nightmare that is trying to take control of your mind to attack your spirit. You will also have ideas, thoughts or emotional impulses that are inconsistent with your character. You should always disregard what is inconsistent. Know what is of you and what is not. The last aspect that you must have in your spirit is self control. Self control manages and balances the dual forces of passion and rationality. You use self control to determine when you are experiencing too much passion or are being too rational. Control your emotions in your dreams so that they do not control you.
Conquering Nightmares
Killing a pusher
Nightmares act against your spirit to destroy you. Imagine the nightmare as a person and conquer that nightmare by whatever means to survive. To kill a pusher nightmare, you must use your willpower to kill them. You must realize that pushers attempt to deceive you by projecting images. You will know when you are having a pusher nightmare because you will feel some type of pressure on the back of the head, where visual images are interpreted. Pushers gain their skill in dreams from projecting images through their eyes; their eyes are symbolic of their abilities. Therefore you must destroy their eyes in the waking or sleeping dream to take away their powers. Do not limit yourself to just striking at their eyes; the abdomen, neck, and head are all prime weak spots for every type of nightmare.
Killing a tormentor
To kill a tormentor nightmare, you must drive them mad and let them lose self control. Always know and remember that Tormentors are separate individuals from yourself. Their voices are usually high pitched and utter profanities and vulgarities. Sometimes they may taunt you to kill yourself or kill innocent bystanders. Drive them mad while keeping yourself in a calm state. In the dream state, tormentors are represented as long distance fighters, their main weapon is their voice. You must use long distance attacks to kill them and avoid getting overwhelmed by emotions that stem from their annoying sounds. Remember that if you imagine them as representing people in real life, then they are just as flesh and blood as you and their strength from using their voice will eventually subside. One prime opportunity to strike them is whenever they speak, this is their moment of weakness in dreams because most of their energy is concentrated in screaming with their tongues. You must control yourself when combating these types of nightmares so that you never experience an overflow of emotion, because when you do that is symbolized in the dream as them taking away your life force. Their ability is symbolized by their tongue; you must destroy their tongue in order to take away their power. The more vivid and real the damage you do to a nightmare, the more damage is instigated on the nightmare itself.
Killing a diseaser
A diseasers main weapon of choice is their hands; they take away your life force from you by the touch of their skin and flesh. You must avoid their touch whenever possible. Since they take away life their weakness is symbolized by life itself. A prime environment to fight a diseaser is in an area where nature is plentiful. Light and water are like deadly toxins to a diseaser. When they are exposed to such elements they will feel pain. Their main form of attack is also their main weak spot; the hands. If you have enough will power, in your dreams imagine yourself wearing thick gloves and holding the hands of a diseaser together, this will cause them to drain the life force from themselves and disintegrate into dust.
Becoming the meek hero
God gives strength to those who are wronged unjustly. Whenever you fight a nightmare you must realize that you are the one that is being wronged, that you are the one that is having injustice done to them by the entities that would try to destroy your mind, body, and spirit. Never let a nightmare make you think otherwise. Nightmares are not innocent, if they were they would not be nightmares. You must show no mercy to that which tries to destroy or corrupt you. Always strike back at the nightmares in defense, not in malice. Defend yourself by killing nightmares but always remember that hate and respect for them are two qualities that you need to avoid ignorance and arrogance within yourself.
Imagination as a tool for control
Imagination can be used as a weapon in dreams. It is a tool that allows you to will the battle to your liking. With will power and imagination on your side you can become the master of your spirit. To master imagination is to form more neural pathways while awake. You do this by performing daily routines differently with different parts of your body. Instead of brushing your teeth with your right hand use your left hand. Imagine yourself performing different actions or seeing objects move in different ways. Imagine a mirror image of yourself driving the car on the passenger’s side. Imagine dominos that are standing up falling or how you would move a certain chess piece during a game. Another way you can increase your neural pathways to enhance your imagination is to make safe and shameless mistakes. A safe mistake is one that does not result in death. A shameless mistake is one that does not result in punishment. To increase imagination is synonymous with increasing control of your spirit in dreams.
Physical practice to perfect dream control
Some people remember the famous news story of the Star Wars Kid, a high school student who video taped himself performing light saber movements with a microphone stand. What was overlooked by many is this individual’s inner desire to exercise his imagination, in the same way that children innately do. Two mistakes that the Star Wars Kid made were that he wasn’t discreet and that he did not realize that his actions had a deeper psychological meaning.
Physical practice can perfect dream control while awake and asleep. One way this can be done is to perform random fight movements to the beat of music. This practice is called shadow-fighting, similar to shadow boxing, where you imagine fighting opponents and killing them as you move, in this case you do it to the beat of music. To increase the association between movements and music, it is recommended that you use soundtrack music that was featured prominently during fight scenes in movies. You can either buy the soundtrack music or record it off of the DVD with an mp3 audio mixer. Fight to the music and what is heard in the scene. Once you have imagined what is in the movie in your movements, imagine something different. Experiment with other techniques and movements to vary all your shadow fighting as much as possible. The purpose of physical practice is to force your mind to remember what you have learned while awake and incorporate it into your subconsciousness and unconsciousness, so that when you fight in your dreams against nightmares you will have better control of your spirit, and may even be able to move in your dreams as if you were on automatic pilot.
Body language to perfect dream control
There are two techniques that you can master that will allow you better control over dreams and nightmares.
The sniffling technique
The sniffling technique is an advanced body language technique. It is advanced because when mastered you will be able not only to fight nightmares consciously but on instinct, in the same way that a machine operates automatically. It should be noted that you should not attempt to use this technique unless you have strong enough nasal passages and are accustomed to sniffling often. It takes years of practice and exposure to bacteria to create resilient nasal tissue. To perform the sniffling technique, use your nose as an indicator of when you should disregard and counteract stimuli from nightmares while awake. This is done by self-conditioning yourself to ignore and counteract nonsense thoughts when they happen at all times. Once you can sniffle on instinct whenever you experience a fictitious or absurd thought, force yourself to make a symbolic connection between sniffling and striking at the person represented by the nightmare automatically. Remember as you sniffle all the shadow fighting attacks that you performed. If you make a conscious connection between shadow fighting and sniffling, your brain will eventually understand and automatically strike the nightmares whenever you sniffle.
The voice box technique
This technique will allow all layers of your psyche to better distinguish between your thoughts and thoughts from nightmares. To do this project the phrases that you hear in your mind that you know are nonsense or are out of character with yourself through your vocal cords without speaking. You do this by conditioning your mind to speak what is awkward from your thoughts and project it without opening your mouth into your voice box, in the same way that a ventriloquist speaks. The main difference is that you only want to register the thought outside of your mind, not let others hear the sounds coming from your throat. Train yourself to hear the thoughts in your throat instead of your mind to better associate them with garbage thoughts. This technique has the added effect of relieving stress associated with hearing bad automatic thoughts by projecting them outside of your brain and into a region of your body where they do not affect you mentally.
Shrouds
Shrouds
Every night I sleep I put on a shroud of my own making which gives me comfort in the silence. But sometimes when I dream the shrouds of others try to cloud my sight, giving me dreams that are not real.
These shrouds of evil try to envelop the good of mankind with sickness, death and madness, but all they succeed in doing is revealing the truth to my eyes. And that truth is that evil is weaker than good, because it has to rely on illusions so that they can fight. Without illusions all evil is revealed to be full of arrogance and bigotry.
Evil wants to believe that it can win with the shroud, but all that it succeeds in doing is training the good of mankind to ignore its illusions.
Make your own shroud each night in your dreams of sleep to envelop you with joy. Let this shroud shine good fortune on you for all the days to come, let the shrouds of evil encompass their own attackers in despair and pain. All the madness they wish to inflict on good will envelop them in chaos and destroy their beings.
The shrouds that you imagine putting over yourself are symbolic of a state of being that you wish to put yourself in. They allow you to see what you want to see without having to imagine the environment around you. Shrouds in dreams are like a cloth-like TV screen that you use cover yourself with, and tune in to the desired channel. They are easier to imagine in dreams instead of trying to create an environment from scratch. Nightmares also use shrouds to cloud your judgement and confuse you with disturbing images. These as well as other shrouds can be taken off in the same way that you take off a shroud in real life. Sometimes in the nightmare the shrouds are tied down to the ground to make it harder for you to escape it. In this situation all you have to do is use a weapon to cut through the shroud.
Nightmare movements and tactics
If you interpret nightmares as people, then you must realize that their movements in your dreams are chaotic, yet their movements always lead to one goal, your destruction. Let nightmares come to you, not the other way around. Some nightmares try to disorient you with their movements. There is one attack that involves them spinning around you in the same way that a tetherball spins around a pole. To counter such an attack, hold your weapon at an upward angle and counter to the direction of the nightmare’s movement aim for the head and stab in between the eyes. Remember that when a nightmare dies in your dreams they die a real PHYSICAL death. They are composed of real matter when they die, they bleed when they die, you see their dismembered flesh when they die. Nightmares rarely die when they are killed in a fictional manner, such as melting away, being turned to stone, or being turned into Swiss cheese.
When you have conquered a nightmare
When you have killed a nightmare, several things will have occurred, assuming that you are only fighting one and not many. In most cases you will have had a vivid dream showing that you have killed a person who represented the nightmare in your dream, and that person has died a real physical death. You will have no awkward fictitious thoughts or memories, and you will not sense that you are recalling memories randomly as is the case for free association. Another thing to note is that you will be without physical or mental pain in your body. However you must be aware of the possibility of a delayed reaction to physical pain; this is symbolized in the dream by “delayed attacks” such as a bomb planted on your body in the dream that explodes after the fight is over.
In dreams anything is possible
What you must realize is all the things that you see in art can be mimicked in dreams if you have the willpower and skill. Just as you see your favorite super hero fly and jump from building to building, so can you. Just as you see your favorite hero use energy attacks to destroy an opponent, so can you. You must realize that any and all the fighting techniques performed by heroes and villains in movies, in literature, in comic books and in artwork, can be imagined and performed by the spirit in your dreams. You can also create your own techniques concerning body language whenever needed and useful. All that is required is that you know that you can do it and that you have the skill. Learn to be the master of your dreams, and you will become the master of yourself in real life as well.
CONTACT INFORMATION
http://www.freewebs.com/thenightmarehero
thenightmarehero_author@yahoo.com Visit my above website to download free PDF files of the following essays:
The Three Es of Movies: Entertainment, Enlightenment, and Enjoyment How to Combat Earworms Good and Evil Increasing your Imagination & How to Remember your Dreams Passion, Rationality, and Self Control How to Balance your Brain and Body Breaking and Changing Associations How to Stop Bad Automatic Thoughts Ignoring Lies, Distractions, and Details
Ping! Just thought you might be interested.. :-D
I find it amazing that we know so little about the purpose and source of dreams given the many years we've had to figure it out. I've had that had no context in anything I've seen or experienced in life....what up with dat?
I'll go back and read this article, though it seems awfully long. I began controlling my dreams long ago without planning to. As a teenager, when I woke up from a bad dream, I simply made up a good ending. I guess I got into the habit of immediately putting a good ending on the dream as soon as I woke, or even partially woke, and now, as soon as I realize I am asleep and I can change it. "It's MY dream and I can do whatever I want to!" It works for me.
Yep, the writer summed it up in the last paragraph.
Dreams are doorways.
What you have is a gift, nourish it, don't squander it. if its too long for you read the pdf version in adobe reader with the speech engine turned on. If you want a free copy of a makeshift audio book that I made of this article, PM me.
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