Whether you have nightmares or not you can get over many of your fears by working with your dreams, including nightmares and healing dreams. We show you some of our chief dreamwork techniques here, with real from life examples to inspire. Written by one of the world's leading experts on working with dreams.

1. Face your nightmares as part of you. They have a reason for disturbing you
Nightmares show us what we are afraid of. What we are afraid of we are probably not dealing with. Just remembering a nightmare is the beginning of handling them. Your goal can be to handle your nightmares so that you can deal with them and what scares you in life.

2. Nightmares can train you to handle your fears
In life there are things that go wrong. We get sick. We get betrayed and deceived. We lose things. People die on us. We love and lose. We can lose our job, our money, our friends, our lives even. Nightmares come to us, not just to warn us of a situation we may be creating, but to train us in dealing with the negative in life. If you can deal with the negative in dreams you can deal with the negatives in life.

3. A nightmare is any dream we wake up from in fear
Why are we frightened in our dreams? Look at yourself in your nightmare. See how you are probably trying to hide or run from the dream situation, rather than facing it.

Example: This is a typical chase scene. Someone is chasing you in your dream and you run thinking this figure chasing you will hurt you. However, as many dreamwork students have done, you can choose to turn around and face the chaser and ask them what they want from you.

In life, face your adversaries as best you can, rather than run from them. Yet if the situation is overwhelming, sometimes the right choice is to flee.

4. A nightmare is always where the image of you in the dream feels attacked or is attacked
Just as in life, the "you in the dream" has unconscious attitudes. When in your next nightmare you feel afraid and overwhelmed, so much so you feel you have to wake yourself up, then after doing so, look at the attitude you had in the dream. Attitudes Dreamwork: Is it something like, what I don't know will hurt me. Or, I am not strong enough to handle my life. Or, I will just make things worse if I confront this situation. There are many possible attitudes motivating our fears. Once you find the fear-attitude that fits you, create the opposite attitude and use that attitude instead. Like, I can deal with almost anything if I choose to. Next, rewrite your nightmare with the new attitude and how you might act differently. This works very well also in training your children to handle their nightmares. Only you tell stories together, the original nightmare of your child, now turned into a positive "dealing with story."

5. Learn to be more heroic in your dreams and you will be more heroic in life in dealing with bad things
As in point 4, dreamwork is doing something positive with your dream. With a series of nightmares you have you can rewrite each one in which you are acting more positively. Don't change the fear-inducing imagery, only your own attitude and behavior in the dream. If the dream imagery changes naturally, go with it.

Dream Example: a student had a repeat nightmare on several different nights in which this woman in the park near where she lived chased her. The faster she ran the faster the woman behind her ran. She shared this in dream group and was asked, why not stop in your dream and face the woman and ask what she wants? The next night she dreamed her chase dream again but remembered to turn and asked the woman why she was chasing her. The chaster said she just wanted to catch up to her and make friends with her!

The fundamental attitude here is to not assume a person or situation will do you harm. First accept the situation as it is and then find out its meaning and deal with it.

6. Find out what you are afraid of in dreams
In your dream you may be afraid that things get out of control, and so your dream-creator creates a dream in which you are not able to control the situation. In dreams and life you may habitually resist others and situations not of your own choosing. This can show up in nightmares. Learn to accept things and not try to control them. Work with a person or situation rather than try and dominate out of fear. You may not be facing that your life behavior is in fact dangerous, like driving to fast. Then you have a nightmare of crashing your car with enough intensity to scare you into facing the reality of how you do drive. When having a nightmare, find out what in the dream you are afraid of and see if a similar situation is happening in you and your life. Dream Example: Yes, this dream happens to people. A woman dreamed of driving her car and going down a steep hill when she realized her brakes were not working. She woke herself up before she crashed. Yes, she had her car brakes checked, but she realized her attitude and behavior was that she was going too fast in her life. She had no brakes. She was not limiting herself and her compulsive behavior, and if she did not slow down, take breaks, and so on, she would indeed crash, like sickness, car accident, losing a relationship, God knows what!

7. Use your dreams to find out what you are afraid of in life
Each nightmare represents a fear you have in life. If you are afraid you have cancer in life, or will get some terrible disease, then you may dream of that happening in a nightmare. Nightmares are also dreams that show us we lack the ability to control what happens to us. In life we are not heroes that can overcome any adversity. We don't have the power to control what happens to us. We do have some power to relate to the dark side of life through choice and available resources. Don't let fear paralyze you or you will not even deal with adversity as you can.

Dream-Life example: a teenage boy the author worked with in a treatment center dreamed he was swimming in the bay and a giant hand reached up and pulled him under. After five years of residential treatment the boy did get better and go out on his own as a young adult. However, he wanted to go to Europe and got into a cargo carrier box going to Europe. When they opened the box in Europe he was suffocated. This boy was still weak in his perception of reality and could not protect himself in a real world. He dreamed his problem of going into dangerous places, in his mind or in outer life, and not paying heed to the real dangers of being overwhelmed. It took his life, just as surely as heavy drug addiction takes the lives of its users.

8. Fear is seeing what could happen that is a danger to you but not actually happening
Fear is perception of possible loss. The amazing thing is that we all get afraid of things that could happen but are not actually happening. Maybe a trauma happened to you in the past so you fear it happening again. The reality is more like good and bad things happen to us in life about equally. It's what we do with them that counts. If we stay in fear, we try to run away, freeze up, or reject what might be life-enhancing because we are afraid it could go wrong. Our nightmares give us situations that maybe point this out to us. The solution is to deal with dangers realistically and with all the strength we can summon to handle things. Teach your kids to do this also.

Know the difference between what is a real danger and what is you projecting danger.

9. When we know what we are afraid of and are dealing with it directly as the situation is happening we have no time to be afraid
It's mostly true! Think of situations in which you have been in danger. Did you just freeze up or did you do something? The reality point is that when in a dangerous situation don't project worse than it is or you might freeze up. Accept what is happening but relax, accept it as it is, and then you have more choice and power to do something, even if it is only to prevent worse from happening. Dreams can rehearse this kind of thing with us. Work on the scary dreams to get to a place where you rewrite and relive them with you being as active as possible, and not projecting worse into the situation than is actually happening.

10. Fear is an attitude and not a reality. We have nothing to be afraid of in life or in our dreams
Yes, we have nothing to be afraid of in life. We can be hurt, and probably will be. We can be killed by disease, accident or criminality. But as long as we are alive and well, we are alive and well. Don't let attitudes that the worst will happen govern your living life now in each moment. Don't let negativistic attitudes control you in life. Dreams teach you this if you let them. Not only look at your nightmares or scary dreams. Look also at your positive dreams and learn from them. Now how did your dream have you solving that problem? Always look for something positive, even in the worst nightmare. Don't project it there. See it there. Change your attitude.

11. Dreams mirror life, life mirrors our dreams
We know that by now, don't we? When you remember a dream, ask yourself, how is that also happening in my life? It might not be the exact same content, but a similar content in which you react in a similar way. What's good at following our dreams when we remember them is that they teach us about ourselves. The first dreamwork method is to look at how you are acting and not acting and try to see why you act in the dream the way you do. Then ask yourself, how could I have acted more positively and effectively? Decide to do that next time in dreams or life in which such a situation comes up. As we change how we act in life for the better we will also be more effective in how we act in dreams.

As in dreams, so in life!

12. To fulfill yourself in life keep widening the circle of the things you are not afraid of
We know this, don't we? Those of us who are pretty much afraid all the time have a narrow limit of experiences we let themselves have. The more the variety of experiences we let ourselves have in life the more we learn how to cope with life and make the most of it. Thus when you are afraid to do something new, consider if maybe you can risk doing that new thing for the benefits you might gain. This doesn't mean you just unconsciously let go and jump off a cliff. Consider the risks and consider doing what is an acceptable risk to you, and see what happens and see how it makes you a more effective person in dreams, in life, in relationships. Remember, you are responsible for your own choices in life and no one can make your choices for you. Having said this, then choose and deal with the consequences.

Learn from life by living life.

13. Write down your nightmares and complete them
A nightmare is an uncompleted dream that we wake up in fear from before the dream can complete itself.

Dream Example: Who knows, maybe when falling in a dream you should let yourself complete the fall and see what happens? So then, when you wake up from a nightmare, write it down and give it an ending that feels right for you and the dream. Make yourself stronger in the dream if necessary and see what new dream imagery comes to you that resolves the dream situation. Then see how this completed dream is a lesson for you in how to better deal with life.

14. Use allies and other helps in your dreams
Yes, some of us are able to be aware in some of our dreams and thus to strengthen ourselves. If you can't do this is a nightmare itself, then after waking up you can close your eyes and go back into the nightmare, but this time take a positive person or power object with you to help you out. See what happens this time when you encounter the same nightmare situation.

Dream Example: A long-time student of her dreams had a positive figure show up in her depressing dreams. This figure gave her hope she was not alone. She learned then in new depressing dreams to call on this helpful woman, dream figure to guide her through the darkness of her dreams. In life also she successfully transformed into someone a lot more positive and able to deal with herself, her dreams and the stresses of life.

15. Paint your nightmares but put a golden circle around that figure you are afraid of
Some people paint their dreams. You don't have to be an artist to do so. Just taking your child's crayons, or whatever, and putting marks on paper inspired by your dream can have emotional results for you. If you paint your fears, your darkness, your anger, evoked in you by a nightmare, or happening in your life, it releases your blocks. Colors often used for anger, or adversity, are black or red, or yellow even. But if things feel really dark you can paint a healing symbol for you in your picture, or that of your child's. Or a golden circle. This helps balance the dark side coming out in your painting and thus is more healing and balancing.

16. Look at your nightmares and other dreams for what is happening or not happening in your intimate relationships
For health's sake people in intimate relationships should be honest, expressive and very real. All involved should make it safe for each member of the relationship to express all the many sides of themselves. Thus we have a lot of relating dreams, some of them nightmare or fear dreams. You can share some of your dreams in the relationship, but watch out because dreams are the most honest part of yourselves. They often reveal hidden thoughts and behavior concerning our relationships. Be committed to dealing fully and honestly with what is happening in relationship, even if first revealed in a dream.

Dream-Life Example: A woman dreamed her partner was having sex with another woman. That afternoon she asked her man if he was having an affair. He was honest and said yes. They chose to end their relationship. Thus, if you follow your dreams honestly and share some of them in relationship it will make your relationship honest as well!

It is more important that a relationship is fully real than that it lasts a long time.

17. My fears make me real
This came to the present author when he was very afraid in some of his dreams and in life situations. He realized that fear means realness. He cannot fool himself. He cannot paint lovely pictures and avoid the dangers in his life, or his inadequacies. So he turned his attitude around to face his fears and thus build a better life.

18. Analyze your image in the dream for the attitude that makes the "you in the dream" afraid
Dreamwork Attitudes Technique: We talked about this, but it is such an excellent technique. First, list what you in the dream, your dream ego, is doing in the dream or nightmare. Then try and think of an attitude motivating each of the actions you do in the dream. Then evaluate. Ask yourself, is my behavior and attitude appropriate to the dream situation, or off? If you are off, then you are incongruent. This means you are not in tune with what is happening. Whether in a dream or life situation, such as in intimate relating or at work, see if you are usually congruent with situations, in tune with them as they are and cooperative in bringing out their value. When you find yourself in conflict, usually it is some attitude in you, like, things should be fair, that is blocking you from cooperative handling of the situation. Fairness is an attitude, not a truth. Things are often not fair in life, so deal with them as they are!

19. Analyze yourself as to whether you live from negative or positive motivation in life
Ah, this is a great one!!! There are only two motivations for living life, positive or negative, or some combination of both.

Life Value: Either I live from fear, needing to be secure, needing to control people and things, or I live from the creative, the opposite of fear. A creative person accepts most of a situation and choose to develop the values possible therein. They accept and then see what is positive that can come out of the situation, and they emphasize that, while still dealing with the negatives, but not exaggerating them! Look for these two motivational attitudes in your dreams and in your behavior.

20. Choose to be positive and accepting in dreams and life and see if things do or don't go better for you
Yes, finally, when you have insights about yourself, others and life they mean little if you don't act upon them. If you are caught in negative motivation, at least start to do things from positive motivation. See what happens for you. Also, try and limit your negative attitudes, at least pause, and see if you can choose to be positive in the situation. Look in your dreams for positive things you do, and see how you can do these things also in life.

Transform yourself and your nightmares at the same time!

Example: A student dreamed she was in a hospital bed and afraid she had breast cancer. Her dream task was to meditate on the closed door to that hospital room, seeing it in her mind's eye for several days. Just meditate, kind of accepting the closed door without projecting anything into it. Was there a person, herself, in that room with cancer or not? She feared in her original dream that there was. She did several meditation sessions and then chose to open the door without fear and see what was there. She was not in the hospital bed with cancer. In outer life she had been diagnosed with possible breast cancer. After her dreamwork-meditation experience of changing her attitude of projecting the worst but being objective and accepting, it turned out that the doctor could no longer find anything that indicated she had breast cancer.

Sometimes it is true that if we change our dreams we change our lives. And if we change our lives our dreams will change.

Strephon Kaplan-Williams is a well-known expert on the new dreamwork, the author of many books on doing dreamwork with your dreams. See his website and books for sale at: http://www.dreamwork2000.com/guestbook/index.html and to obtain free advice about your dreams in a popular dreamwork forum.