GHOST HUNTERS

A nightmare is a dream that occurs during sleep that brings out strong feelings of fear, terror, distress, or anxiety. Nightmares usually happen in the second part of the night and wake up the sleeper, who is able to remember the content of the dream . We have many kinds of dreams during the night. There are dreams that replay the day and we sort of "work" in our sleep. I seem to recall these ones a lot when I wake up. I feel like I spent a lot of the night working my job-- jeez ! Then, we have venting dreams in which we work out anxieties, i.e, falling, being chased, hiding.... Often we have dreams in which we integrate parts of ourselves. We observe someone else's behavior and judge it to be bad, good, scary, or whatever. Interestingly, these are often a reflection of us not owning a part of ourselves, some aspect of our personality. I once got upset because I had lesbian dream and then found out that it made sense at the time. I was owning my female aspect and apprecia...

It's another in my series about dreams . Repeat dreams are fairly common. Most often, these are thematic, such as; naked in a public place, teeth falling out, running but staying in place, post-apocalypse, tornadoes chasing you, forgetting a locker number or being late for class on a test day. A lot of these are universally common. Some are very specific and unusual. The thing they have in common is the issue one is wrestling with. Let's look at the naked in a public place one. Should I have one where I'm naked in a public place and people recognize I'm naked and point and such, then I feel like everyone sees all my shortcomings and I'm under scrutiny. If, however, I know I'm naked but they don't, then I feel there's something others are missing about my character that if exposed would be shaming. In other words, I'm snowing them, but I'm inches away from being found out. This one is likely to happen if I feel I'm in over my head on a task an...

What do you do when a dream comes true--literally? Well, I have some very strange examples to share. Welcome to my dream world. It's not always problem solving or assimilation of new realities like deaths in the family or divorce. No, I also have these dreams that, well, involve actualities . The first premonition dream I remember having I just after my son was born, a little over a week after. It was an Aloha Airlines flight with a hole blow in the fuselage and a flight attendant sucked out of it. The thing that stood out for me was the perspective. I was on the co-pilot's side of the plane, flying without a plane slightly behind the airplane when the hole blew out and the flight attendant went hurling. I thought it was just a strange dream, but while I nursed my newborn, I watched the news and they showed the exact scenario. It disturbed me, but I put it away and ignored it. I was a new mom and had better things to do. However, over the ensuing decades, I continued to have ea...

"Dream Work" is a new series because I want to address dreams, but I don't want to do it in one breathy long post. It's too important and there's too much to say. People ask me about dreams a lot. Things show up in dreams that are disturbing, out of place, and just plain weird. No matter what the plots and who the characters are, none of it really is relevant except for an exercise in skills. Look at it this way, you're riding to jury duty and your mind is thinking ahead about what might happen if you get picked and how you'll have to sit in the boring courtroom and maybe do it or days on end and you wonder if the people you're sitting there with are interesting or total morons you have to fight with. You just daydreamed a scenario to prepare yourself for what's ahead. We do the same thing in sleep. Our dream state tells us just how well we're coping or not coping in our awake world. Suppose you have the dream about someone stalking you in a f...

People often bring up the subject of nightmares with me. Perhaps it’s the psychic side of me or the fact that I’ve counseled folks with anxiety issues for over 20 years, but somehow folks feel comfortable bringing up their inner fears. On my own time, in the past few years I’ve noticed repeated post-apocalypse nightmares in my dream-state themes. They weren’t something I ever dreamed up before, but something born in the post 9-11 time period with Bush’s color-coded terror alerts and duct tape and plastic, anthrax and airport shut downs when people sneak past security. Many people have expressed to me having similar themed dreams. I’m guessing during WWII there were similar nightmares of bombs dropping, invasions, et cetera. The content of the dreams can reflect people you ran into that day, movies you watched before bedtime, and running background anxieties. The sleep state offers you time to work out things, problem solve and release fears and gain mastery. The theme of the apocalypse...