Introduction
A bolt of lightning pierced the rain-whipped waves, illuminating the depths beneath the ship’s belly to expose the shadow of a colossal monstrosity. Its massive, snake-like body undulated in a rhythmic, circular pattern beneath the churning surface of the sea. While the creature could easily devour the entire craft, destruction was not its intent—it relished the stench of my fear. An ancient terror emanated from the beast, echoing louder and louder across the frozen expanse of my mind as the tendrils of a black, etheric ooze curled around my chest and through the passageways of my lungs. The familiar sensation of overwhelming panic poured into my limbs, drowning me in its suffocating ichor.
CRACK!
The air sizzled and danced with electricity as a clap of thunder rolled across the waves, snapping me into the present moment. Racing across the deck, I launched myself up the stairs that led to the bridge looking for help but the helm was empty. Acknowledgment brutally collided with dread as I realized I was the only person aboard this vessel. A mouthful of bile rose up, stinging my tongue with the acrid blackness of despair. I swallowed, forcing it back down into the frothing witch’s brew in my stomach, and tried to harden my resolve.
A quick assessment from the bridge provided little comfort. Steering the ship was practically inconceivable in this tempest, the lack of starlight rendered navigation nearly impossible, and the mast had started to splinter under the weight of unmanaged sails. Any last remnants of hope I’d had washed away with the pounding sheets of rain. I was alone at sea with the king of earthly demons. My light went out.
The coolness of a shadow loomed across the quarterdeck and as I turned to greet it my eyes took in the rising wall of water that stood twenty years high. The rogue wave from countless nightmares was back and though it had never completely enveloped me before, I knew now that it was unavoidable. Tonight, it stood as a harbinger of doom and there, within the wall of black water, shone the calculated, beady eyes of the monster in the depths—a biblical behemoth.
Leviathan.
It extended its head out from the wave, slowly reaching toward me as rivulets of water cascaded down its black scales. The beast’s yellow eyes, vaguely familiar, commanded my limbs to slacken and still. Caught in its spell, I almost recognized the hidden memory that shimmered within those orbs, a deep fear that I had buried long ago. Though I didn’t fully comprehend its significance, a profound sense of knowing clicked into place and I knew, I knew, this monster had been waiting to meet me.
Then, in a moment of brief lucidity, I realized that my recurring Creature-in-the-Depths Nightmare had been holding a key all along. The answers were just there, dancing within the knowledge of those glowing yellow pupils but before full recognition could set in, the leviathan opened its maw and mercifully devoured me whole, plunging us both into the watery abyss below.
I had met my maker.
(Exploration and Interpretation, Creature-in-the-Depths Nightmare)
This is a book about nightmares—both the ones I’ve dreamt and the ones I’ve lived through—and how I used their wisdom to heal my life.
Nightmares are a subset of dreams categorized by the feeling of fear and, like dreams, nightmares are an expression of our internal conversation. They can be experienced through any combination of physical, psychological, and spiritual senses such as visual imagery, sound, touch, taste, smell, emotion, intuition, and even simply the sense of knowing. While nightmares are most common in childhood many people can develop recurring or frequent nightmares in adulthood as well. If left unacknowledged, recurring nightmares can become debilitating and are often observed in conjunction with a combination of other symptoms such as sleep difficulties or insomnia, problems with memory and concentration, psychological stress or illness, trouble regulating mood and emotions, a declining quality of personal connections and relationships, and even suppressed immune system function or physical illness. The key to healing our nightmares (the ones we dream and the ones we live through) begins with understanding that nightmares are a symptom, and all symptoms have a root cause that can be healed.
Symptoms are messengers of the mind-body-energy system that creates our human experience and their message is always the same: find, acknowledge, and work with the root. When we listen to our symptoms, acknowledge our roots, and work to begin healing them, our symptoms (the messengers) are no longer needed. Our dreamtime nightmares are an observation of our internal fear-based conversation. Therefore, our nightmares hold the unique information we each individually need in order for us to identify, acknowledge, and work with our roots to heal the nightmares we’ve lived through.
For twenty years of my life, I experienced consistent and recurring nightmares with frequent episodes of sleep paralysis—a temporary state of consciousness one enters just before waking often characterized by the sensation of complete or partial paralysis and feeling deeply afraid. Over time, I developed a fear of sleep entirely and attempted to avoid my nightmares by suppressing them with alcohol and marijuana. I found that while substances did lessen the immediate impact of my nightmares, they only prolonged the inevitable and buried the fear that needed to be felt.
Substances also made it more difficult for me to fall asleep and stay asleep, submerging my mind-body-energy system into a state of perpetual fatigue that began to expose a myriad of other symptoms I had purposefully avoided acknowledging throughout my life. My symptoms (again, the messages I was sending myself) included mental illness, high blood pressure, a decline in the quality of my relationships, difficulty concentrating at work, painful migraines that would send me home early, and unstoppable emotional outbursts that often descended into intense panic attacks. At first, I adopted the typical societal narrative that I should just push through the symptoms, take a pain pill to get me through the day and hope the symptoms would go away on their own. But when I moved to Seattle in November of 2016, I began to acknowledge just how overwhelming my symptoms were becoming and the deep impact they were having on my life. I knew that something needed to change.
I had just completed a five-year enlistment in the Marine Corps (an extra year was devoted to the special schooling for my job or MOS—Military Occupational Specialty) and I assumed that these symptoms, along with my nightmares, were just a result of my deployment to Afghanistan the year prior. As I settled into my new life in Seattle, I put any ingrained, pride-based narratives aside for a moment and began working regularly with a psychological therapist to address my symptoms in what I thought would be a quick and efficient manner. I was a Marine, goddammit, and I figured I’d just find out whatever was causing it and beat the source back into submission!
Boy was I wrong.
As I waded into the murky waters of my life’s history I discovered that my symptoms and nightmares had existed well before I entered the service and that, while I did have service-connected PTSD, something else was lingering in the depths. The deeper I dove, the clearer it became that the thundering echoes of mortar fire were just the tip of the iceberg and lying at the bottom of my hollowed-out heart were two horrific memories I had buried as well as the foundational beliefs that I was a guilty soul and completely undeserving of life. It wasn’t the nightmares themselves that were causing my suffering, it was the devastating, raw, unprocessed, and unacknowledged moments that I had buried deep within my subconscious in order to survive the horrors of my childhood. It was my roots.
Our roots are the foundational moments that shape us. They’re often the first memories that surface when someone asks about our life story and are usually tied to the people that have impacted us the most. Our roots are often emotionally charged and highlight the major, transitional events of our lives. Most of our roots are processed without much conscious thought like graduating high school and setting out on our own as a young adult or marrying a partner and beginning to build a life together. But some roots carry a heavy weight with them and can become stuck, mired in the grips of an emotional depth we don’t currently have the capacity to comprehend. The roots that get stuck are almost always fear-based and are centered in the most difficult or traumatic moments of our lives.
Some fear-based roots can be processed quickly, like watching a scary movie and only needing to sleep with the lights on for a week before resuming a natural sleep pattern (as I did after seeing the creepy vampires in Salem’s Lot as a teenager), but other fear-based roots halt their processing entirely, freezing the root moment in time along with the emotions, thoughts, and even physical sensations present in the experience. We do this not because we are failing ourselves in some way, but because we simply don’t have the tools, feeling of safety, verbiage, or understanding needed at the time of the initial impact to fully comprehend and process the experiences. It’s as if we’re saving the work for later when we find the resources and words to make sense of it. Sometimes we save our most difficult roots for a long while until their memories begin to dig a well of tension in the center of the root event and, eventually, we develop symptoms to draw our attention to them—we send ourselves messages. Like an ingrown hair that festers under the surface of the skin, unprocessed roots can begin to show their pain whether we want them to or not, asking for us, through the language of symptoms, to pay attention and do the inner work necessary to resolve them.
As I dove into my roots in Seattle with the assistance of psychological guidance I began to notice that the emotions I felt in my nightmares were identical to the emotions I felt when exploring my frozen roots in therapy. A deep sense of knowing began to bubble up from within me, a knowing that this uncanny resemblance was more than mere coincidence. I followed my gut and began recording and observing my nightmares in an attempt to discover the link between them and my waking life. Over time, I accumulated a significant amount of personal data and discovered that the connection between our nightmares and our unprocessed roots contains the unique wisdom necessary for us to heal.
That single decision—to intentionally acknowledge my nightmares—changed me forever.
Nightmares aren’t a punishment from the universe (though they can certainly feel like it sometimes), nightmares depict our frozen roots and contain the right combination of personal knowledge and observation that we each need in order to pick up the integration process where we left it off and move through the experience once and for all.
Nightmares show us where dissonance exists within ourselves so that we can be empowered to do something about it. They highlight the moments of our lives that have created an overarching narrative of fear that, over time, stymies our capacity for love and joy. They’re the internal messengers, the symptoms, that work on behalf of our greater selves, laying out a healing pathway, showing us what needs to be seen, and encouraging us to be the change we wish to see in our own lives.
Our nightmares exist to help us heal.
The word “healing” can mean many different things to many different people. To me, healing is the process of returning to wholeness. When we first enter this world, we are perfect beings, completely existing in the totality of our true essence as babies, but as we move into the force of linear time, our true nature becomes convoluted. As we grow and age, we try on different societal, familial, and religious narratives for size. Some of them are beneficial structures but many are limiting, and we find ourselves covered in various dialogues and expressions of fear. We’re not doing anything wrong here, it’s just a fact of the human experience, but I believe that each soul’s responsibility on this planet is to become consciously aware of the limiting, fear-based narratives we’ve taken on, do the work necessary to actively work through them, and uncover our innate source of self one layer at a time, returning to wholeness.
Healing begins with the conscious acknowledgment that something needs to change and is followed by action to support and facilitate that change. While it would be nice to have a step-by-step healing formula written within this book, healing is not a one-size-fits-all process, nor is it a linear one. Like the stages of grief, healing is a unique combination of physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual changes that lead us forward in the way we each need. Its intent is not to return to the way things were before—we can never un-know what we now know, un-feel what we have felt, or un-see what we have seen—but rather, healing is the choice to peel back the limiting layers and find a new, loving way to live with the unique circumstances this life has given us.
Some people heal quickly and efficiently, acknowledging and processing their major roots like any other experience as they go. Some people take months, years, or even several decades to process their roots and heal, repressing and avoiding the truth until their nightmares or symptoms run rampant, demanding to be seen and dealt with. And yet, many people lock themselves within a perpetual pattern of avoidance, growing old and passing on without ever listening to the wisdom of their internal selves, experiencing a lifetime plagued by unending nightmares, difficulties and other issues that never resolve simply because they’re unwilling to change.
I was one of the people that ignored my truth for a significant amount of time before working with my roots, suffering through the language of symptoms and nightmares for two decades before finally acknowledging that something needed to change. By the time I acted on this realization and sought out psychological help in 2017, I was close to the bottom of the major depression well. I had avoided my symptoms for so long that my mind had started to avoid itself, leaving me barely able to recall much of my existence before joining the military. Whole years of my memory were gone, replaced by a feeling of nothingness and the desire to believe that my formative years were largely uneventful. I had cut myself off from my foundational roots so viscerally after experiencing pain in such profound ways that I preferred to see nothing at all.
As I began the grueling process of reintegrating myself, I began to remember who I truly was, not the mask I wore, and what I had experienced, working with my memories one at a time in the order that they surfaced—my unique healing pathway. The first major root I consciously held was a memory that I had deeply wounded my younger brother. We had been children at the time (I was six and he was four) but I had taken on the weight of responsibility reserved for eldest siblings and the knowledge of what I had done left profound imprints of self-loathing and guilt upon my conscience that grew with me into adulthood.
Once I acknowledged and began working through that first frozen memory, the burden of guilt that I had carried since childhood started to ease up. My emotional capacity expanded, and I learned that it was safe to feel my way through everything I had locked away because now I had the tools, assistance, and know-how to process it. But as the load of that first frozen root lightened, I realized it wasn’t the only one I carried. My other roots began to thaw, loosening up the years of physical and psychological abuse that defined my upbringing until I unearthed the deepest root of all. It had been waiting in the depths for me to develop the capacity to hold it and now that I was finally walking down the healing pathway, the memories of sexual abuse I had endured as a young girl clicked into place.
Suddenly, my recurring Creature-in-the-Depths Nightmare made sense. The leviathan, my monster of a truth, the thing I knew that I didn’t want to know, had been circling below the emotional storm that permeated much of my life, waiting for a moment of recognition as it emerged from the waves. Not only did the imagery itself make sense, but the emotions most prevalent in that nightmare were identical to those I felt when thinking about my roots: terrified, alone, and frozen in fear. Someone that I trusted, someone that I loved, someone that was supposed to love and protect me as a child had done a terrible thing and I had remained locked inside a state of suffering ever since. My nightmares had been trying to guide me to dig up my own truth the whole time. The acknowledgment of my unprocessed roots initiated my healing experience and in the years that followed I unearthed the lost puzzle pieces to complete the picture. All the while my nightmares shifted and changed with me as I understood more and more of my own truth, guiding me with their unending wisdom.
Through this process, I have made peace with my nightmares and befriended the monsters, now only experiencing them occasionally and without recurrence. I no longer suffer from Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), the symptoms of my Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) are almost nonexistent, I rarely experience the panic attacks that used to rule my life, and I no longer wake gasping for breath from terrifying episodes of sleep paralysis. The best part though is that I have conquered my fear of sleep and have found the joy of dreams again! Today, I help people all over the world interpret and understand their own dreams and nightmares, guide them to their roots and assist them in identifying their unique healing pathway. My cup is overflowing and all of this I attribute to the wisdom of my own nightmares, the therapists, friends, and found family that listened to them, my incessant drive to understand and heal myself, and the desire to live my life as a whole, loving, and authentic being.
This book explores the depths of my story and details exactly how I have healed my nightmares. While most of this is a memoir, I’ve included a couple of sections in the back to add some extra depth and assist you along the way. The Exploration and Interpretation section breaks down the nightmares you’ll find throughout these pages with my style of interpretation and notable takeaways, A Brief Compendium of Common Nightmares contains common interpretations partnered with questions to guide you towards each nightmare's wisdom, and lastly, we have the Books That Changed My Life which may be beneficial to you as well. Take a moment to reference any of these sections at any time—you may find them helpful as you come across reflections of your own nightmares.
I’ll be honest with you, working with nightmares can be brutal at times but it’s always worth it. All nightmares are rooted somewhere in waking life, therefore, all nightmares can be resolved and healed in waking life. As you dive in, it’s important to note that while your nightmares can show you what to heal, it’s up to you to seek out and enact your own resolution. There are many sources of information and services for healing out there (physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual) but these pieces of information and services are only truly effective when you follow through with them. A doctor can perform surgery on your leg after an accident but only your dedication to physical therapy can help you walk freely again. A therapist can help you psychologically and emotionally find internal peace but only if you share with them your truth and fully participate in the work and practice your toolbox. And a reiki practitioner can balance your chakras or clear your energy but if someone cuts you off in traffic on the way home and you roll down your window to make sure the offender can actually see your middle finger as you stick it out the window to yell at them to fuck off then you might find your solar plexus and sacral chakras in chaos again—whoops!
The point is that it’s entirely up to you to heal. It’s your choice to unearth and enact your own healing wisdom within this life and, at the end of the day, it’s your responsibility to show up for yourself. My nightmares were the part of me that wanted to heal and even though it took me a long time to listen, they were so, so very glad when I did.
This is a book about nightmares and how to use their wisdom to heal your life.
You are your own greatest catalyst for change.
You are the healer you need the most and your nightmares have been waiting to show you what they (what you) already know.
It is safe to see. It is safe to know. You have gotten this far, and you are capable of going even further. Take your nightmares by the hand, look them in the eye, and move forward one step at a time. Your nightmares are here to help.
