Reimagine Your Nightmares

Imagery Rehearsal Therapy

Imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT) utilizes your imagination to help you reduce nightmares and improve your sleep. According to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine,“Nightmares are vivid, realistic, and disturbing dreams typically involving threats to survival or security, which often evoke emotions of anxiety, fear or terror.”

Imagery rescripting helps you change the nightmare so that it turns out in a way that doesn’t lead to emotional and nervous system distress.

Dr Leslie Ellis, a Jungian therapist and dream expert, recommends the following protocol.

Stage One: Calming

Make sure you are in a calm state before recalling a nightmare that you want to change. Or, if you wake up from a nightmare, wait for your nervous system to settle. Or, activate your parasympathetic nervous system by extending your outbreath.

Stage Two: Bringing Back the Dream

Recall the dream. As you walk back through the nightmare, see if you can stand a little bit outside of your embodied experience of your dream. Recalling the key elements of your dream, write them down in your journal. If you get activated, touch on the main points, particularly what happened just before you woke up, so that you can imagine it moving forward toward a different conclusion.

Stage Three: Finding and Embodying the Help

As you imagine in the dream, see if you can find something helpful, energizing or inspiring that already exists in the dream. Once the help has been located, explore it more deeply, describe it, feel into it, and get a felt sense of the help, anchoring it in the body. If there is no help inherent in the dream, return to a felt sense of the calm and clear space from Stage One, and only once your nervous system is settled, proceed with the next step.

Stage Four: Dreaming the Dream Onward

At this stage, the aim is to maintain contact with the help and/or the clear and calm space. The unfolding of the new dream ending depends on your physiological state. When you are scared, scary images are more likely to emerge. If you feel frightened, take a break from this process, calm your nervous system, and return to it later.

There are many ways to dream a dream onward to a better end:

a.) Go to the end of the dream, or the ‘turning point,’ and allow your dream to naturally flow forward from there to a place that feels more complete or resolved. Note that these new dream endings do not need to be triumphant or heroic for this process to work. Use your imagination and sense into what would create a sense of relief in your body.

b.) Turn toward the dream aggressor—practice curiosity, which is incompatible with fear. From here, many things can happen. You might become more sympathetic toward the dream villain, or the villain can transform into a less threatening version of themselves. There can be a conversation, a reconciliation, a successful leave-taking or an escape.

c.) Go to the place where your dream feels unresolved, or where you want to do something differently, or have it happen differently. Bring allies or the ‘help’ along with you as you let this new dream unfold in your imagination.

My note: Decide how your body most needs to feel better. Do you need to find your power and stand up for yourself? Do you need to say, "No" to something? Do you need to soften and find compassion? Do you need to say, "Yes" to something? Do you need to turn towards or turn away? Your body will tell you what it needs from the new ending of your dream. What kind of strength do you need to rehearse to feel good?

Stage Five: Consolidate the New Dream and Resulting Transformation

Once your dream has been transformed, take note of and anchor the felt sense you now carry. Consider what feels different and what it might be like to live forward from this new felt sense. Add this ‘new dream’ to your dream journal to read, rehearse and re-experience the good feelings in your body before going to sleep.

Watch the video below to learn more about rehearsing better outcomes to your nightmares before going to sleep at night.