After a horrible nightmare, focus on grounding yourself in reality with deep breaths and getting out of bed, then self-soothe with calming activities like drinking water or listening to soothing sounds, and reassure yourself it was just a dream to gently return to sleep, potentially by changing your sleep position or trying relaxation techniques like visualization or journaling for recurring dreams.
Here are seven strategies that might help you fall back asleep after a bad dream.
An important thing to say, I think oftenly if we have a particularly frightening nightmare dream, the temptation or the fear is that if we go back to sleep, we might go back to that place in our mind. But typically, once we've broken the sleep, then that story normally stops or at least changes in some way.
Meditation, deep breathing or relaxation exercises may help, too. Also, make the bedroom comfortable and quiet for sleep. Offer reassurances. If your child is struggling with nightmares, be patient, calm and reassuring.
Listen out for familiar sounds within your environment e.g. traffic outside Listen to soothing music or an audio book. Keep a relaxing essential oil or unlit fragranced candle by your bed Spray fragrances used by loved ones onto a tissue or item of clothing and keep it by your bed. Keep a glass of water by your bed.
The 3-3-3 rule is a grounding technique designed to help manage anxiety by focusing on the present. It involves three steps: identifying three things you can see, listening for three sounds you can hear, and moving three parts of your body.
Adults with weekly nightmares were nearly three times more likely to die before age 75. Children with frequent nightmares also showed signs of accelerated aging. Nightmares may serve as early warnings of severe mental health crises, including suicide.
Indeed, studies suggest that nightmares are often linked to unmet psychological needs and/or frustration with life experiences. Yet those links aren't always easy to make—except in cases of trauma (discussed below), our nightmares tend to reflect our troubles through metaphor rather than literal representation.
You should never ignore dreams that signal feeling overwhelmed (falling, drowning, being lost), a lack of control (car troubles), missed chances (missing transport), or recurring negative patterns (back to old schools/homes), as these often point to real-life anxiety, stagnation, or unresolved issues you need to address, with some spiritual interpretations also flagging attacks or spiritual pollution like eating food in dreams. Paying attention to vivid, recurring, or disturbing dreams can offer profound insights into your subconscious and guide you toward necessary changes for personal growth and clarity.
They often occur as intense, distressing, or vivid dreams that replay the traumatic event or aspects of it, causing significant anxiety and fear. People with PTSD may experience these intense nightmares regularly, and they often go beyond typical bad dreams.
The 3-2-1 sleep rule is a simple wind-down routine: stop eating and drinking alcohol 3 hours before bed, stop working/mentally stimulating activities 2 hours before, and turn off screens (phones, TVs) 1 hour before sleep, helping you transition to rest by reducing stimulants and preparing your mind and body. It's often part of a larger 10-3-2-1-0 rule, which also adds no caffeine 10 hours prior and no hitting snooze (0) in the morning.
Right-side sleepers may experience fewer nightmares than left-side sleepers. Back sleepers also may be more likely to have nightmares—and research indicates they may also have a harder time recalling their dreams. Stomach sleepers, according to studies, experience dreams that are more vivid, intense, and sexual.
REM sleep can last between 5 and 45 minutes, with each REM cycle longer than the last. Lauri Quinn Loewenberg, a dream expert and author, said, “The first dream of the night is about five minutes long, and the last dream you have before awakening can be 45 minutes to an hour long.”
Nightmares can arise for a number of reasons—stress, anxiety, irregular sleep, medications, mental health disorders—but perhaps the most studied cause is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
According to Goll, warning dreams are still very much a thing. In fact, God may actually prefer to warn us in our sleep because we're less likely to get distracted. Dreams that are “sticky” get our attention and spur us into action. “They feel like flypaper,” he says.
How Long Do PTSD Nightmares Last? For some people, nightmares go away after a few weeks. For others, they may last months or years, especially if not treated. This is called the period of nightmares or chronic nightmares.
We'll explore 10 common dreams many people have and dissect their possible meanings.
Reason #1 Sharing Our Dreams Means We Have to Commit to it!
Are you willing to go out in the world and be that person? Unfortunately, most of the time, we are not. Sharing and committing to your dream is a vulnerable move. It puts us in a place where we realize we will have to change our life.
A question about déjà rêve (already dreamt, a form of déjà experience) was included in a large "sleep, dreams, and personality" survey of 444 (mainly psychology) students at three German universities. The incidence of déjà rêve was high (95.2%) and, like most other déjà experiences, was negatively correlated with age.
Depression and other mental health disorders may be linked to nightmares. Nightmares can happen along with some medical conditions, such as heart disease or cancer. Having other sleep disorders that interfere with adequate sleep can be associated with having nightmares.
Nightmares are a risk factor for later PTSD and suicide. PTSD treatment leads to large reductions in trauma-related nightmares. Treating nightmares in a clinical sample with depression requires testing.
The three types of nightmares are idiopathic, recurrent, and post-traumatic. Idiopathic Nightmares – are dream sequences that are not the result of trauma but often happen when a person is very stressed.
The rarest type of dream is often considered to be the lucid dream, where you are aware you're dreaming and can sometimes control the dream's narrative, with only a small percentage of people experiencing them regularly, though many have had one spontaneously. Even rarer are dreams with specific, unusual content, like dreaming of doing math, or experiencing rare neurological conditions like Charcot-Wilbrand syndrome, where people lose the ability to visualize dreams.
Disturbing dreams can interfere with healthy sleep, which can lead to problems with emotion regulation and overall mental and physical health. Nightmares can increase anxiety and distress and impair daytime functioning. Research shows they are also associated with an increased risk of suicide.
Soothe Yourself. Take a few deep breaths and say to yourself that you're safe, everything is okay, and this was just a bad dream. You don't have to say it out loud, you just need to distract your brain from thinking about the nightmare, and focus on the present moment instead.