How to Overcome Your Fears During a Lucid Nightmare

A sleeping woman with a distressed look on her face because she's having a lucid nightmare

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" by Stephen LaBerge and Howard Rheingold. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

Like this article? Sign up for a free trial here.

Can you really overcome your fears while you sleep? What happens if you become lucid during a nightmare?

According to the authors of Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming, becoming lucid during a nightmare poses many benefits. While nightmares can be frightening, they also provide chances for personal growth.

Here’s how to overcome your fears through lucid nightmares.

Overcome Your Fears

Lucid dreaming can help you face and overcome your fears. Because no actual harm can come to you in a dream, lucid dreams give you a valuable opportunity to safely confront challenging and frightening situations rather than avoid them. When you face your fears in a safe environment like a dream, you learn to recognize when fear is unfounded, build confidence, tap into your strengths and resilience, and eliminate the fears altogether. To do this, right before you fall asleep, decide to dream about what you’re afraid of. The object of your fear will then manifest itself for you to confront.

(Shortform note: Facing your fears in the safe environment of lucid dreams is essentially a method psychologists call exposure therapy. Exposure therapy is a type of cognitive behavioral therapy that helps you confront your fears or anxieties in a controlled, safe environment by gradually exposing you to the source of your fear. It allows your brain to learn that the perceived threat isn’t as dangerous as you initially believed. Through repeated exposure to your fears in environments like lucid dreams, you can reduce your fear response and learn new ways of coping with fear.)

But what if the dream you’re in is already a nightmare? The authors say that when you become lucid in a nightmare, you can transform it into a meaningful and valuable experience. A lucid nightmare gives you an opportunity to face what you fear most. You can choose to wake up from nightmares, but escaping from them will leave you with unresolved internal conflicts that will likely revisit you in your sleep soon. It’s better to stay in the dream and face the fear.

(Shortform note: If you choose to escape from a lucid nightmare by waking up, you’re avoiding what you fear. Psychology experts caution against using avoidance as a coping strategy because avoiding things teaches your brain to be more afraid of them. When you avoid what you fear, you reinforce to the fear centers of your brain that the object or situation is dangerous. Facing your fears can calm your brain down by providing it with new, corrective information that helps it reevaluate the perceived threat, leading to a reduction in fear over time.)

Nightmares often feature a frightening figure—a person, animal, or entity that’s threatening in some way. The authors say you can confront a hostile dream figure in several ways: You can fight it, change it into something non-threatening, or face it and calmly interact with it. Of these choices, the authors recommend the third option in most cases. This is because when you turn to face a frightening figure with an attitude of peace and reconciliation, the figure may offer you valuable insights and naturally transform into something friendly.

When you turn to face a hostile figure, the authors recommend you begin a dialogue with it. Speaking with these nightmare figures can transform and pacify them as well as provide you with valuable insights. The authors suggest asking questions such as: “Who are you?”, “Why are you here?”, and “What do you have to tell me?”

Jung’s Shadow Archetype in Nightmares

For psychoanalyst, philosopher, and mystic Carl Jung, hostile dream figures don’t so much represent things that people are afraid of in the world as they symbolize aspects of ourselves that frighten and confuse us. Jung saw hostile dream figures as manifestations of what he called the Shadow—an archetype (universal symbolic image) representing the subconscious aspects of our personalities that we often repress or deny.

Jung believed that acknowledging and getting to know your Shadow, just as the authors recommend speaking to hostile dream figures, helps you integrate the darker aspects of yourself into your conscious awareness. This process of developing self-awareness and self-acceptance is essential for personal growth and wholeness, as it allows you to confront and integrate hidden, denied, or repressed aspects of your personality that have important psychological functions.

However, the authors write that if a hostile dream figure is someone you’ve been harmed by in real life, the best and most empowering approach may be to fight, destroy, or overpower the figure rather than opening yourself up to a dialogue with them.

(Shortform note: The authors aren’t explicit about why you should choose to fight and destroy dream figures that represent real people who’ve harmed you. However, this approach to nightmare figures is similar to an evidence-based treatment approach for trauma called Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART). ART can alleviate symptoms of trauma, such as those of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, by guiding you to revisit traumatic memories and “rewrite” them. Instead of focusing on what actually occurred in the traumatic situation, you imagine the outcome that you wish had happened, such as successfully protecting yourself from someone who was harming you.)

How to Overcome Your Fears During a Lucid Nightmare