WHEN YOU WAKE UP FROM A BAD DREAM
I usually don’t have bad dreams – you know, a scary dream – where at some point you are terrified and just want to escape. Last night was an exception. I woke several times in the night with anxiety and a tight jaw.
Relaxing the Body When You Wake In the Middle of the Night With a Stab of Panic From a Bad Dream
Perhaps the first thing is to place your hand on your heart and breath until your heartbeat stops racing. Notice where you are in your room. Take in your surroundings. Relax your face. Recognize you are safe and unharmed.
DROP YOUR WEIGHT
Relax your focus. Let your eyes soften and close, imagining them dropping back onto a dark velvet cushion where they can rest. Release tension from your tongue. Let it lie on the floor of your mouth. Feel gravity taking your weight through your body towards the ground. Let your weight drop with gravity into the lowest places. Feel the form of your body on the bed while slowing your breath and breathing into your whole body. Stay in this resting state letting your thoughts drift away without holding onto them, returning to the sensations of your body. Let your weight drop without holding onto it. Check that your eyes and tongue remain soft. Feel the support of the bed so that you can release the tension of the dream into the safety of your room.
CHECK YOUR ALIGNMENT
Where is your chin, your head and neck, in relationship to your torso? Where are your legs in relationship to your torso? Is your torso twisted? Stretch into a place where you feel connected and then relax and go back to letting your weight drop into the support of the bed again.
3-DIMENSIONAL BREATHING
Experience your breath. Is your chest expanding to the front, back, and to the sides? Feel your breath slide down the throat into the chest allowing all sides to widen simultaneously. Feel the release of the breath as your chest narrows. Stay in the rhythm of expanding and releasing without effort, following the breath in and out. Feel yourself here, breathing.
BELLY BREATHING
Place your hand on your belly. Experience your belly expanding when you breath in and falling as you breath out. Stay with the rhythm of the soft, relaxed belly responding to the breath.
RESTING YOUR MIND
Notice if your thoughts are looping. Let your thoughts drift. Let the weight of your brain drop into the skull. Imagine thoughts as clouds dissipating into the dark of night. Soften the eyes and tongue. Let your thoughts drift by without attaching to them. Or if that is too difficult, write them down so that you can let them go and not need to remember them. Imagine your resting body softening and releasing into sleep. Imagine your thoughts puddling with your weight or drifting into space.
To go back to sleep I remember to relax my jaw, release my tongue and the back of my throat as I breathe 3-dimensionally into my sides, front, and back feeling my ribs expand and condense, my lungs, heart and belly expand and release, letting my muscles feel the heaviness of gravity, the support of the bed. I check my neck alignment and adjust my chin until I feel comfortable. I do this repeatedly until I can fully rest my thoughts and my body, until I fall back asleep. The dream keeps returning. I keep doing this sequence to fall back asleep. Clearly there is a message I don’t want to receive.
Around dawn I finally break out of the terror of it and wake up. This time I remember the whole horror-movie dream. I do not want to go back to sleep. I dress warmly and go to make a cup of coffee, the dream still clinging to me. I eat a bit and drink some hot coffee while writing. Writing it down helps me. I can get it out of my head. I do not need to remember the details when they are written down elsewhere. I can think about it later in the light of day once my body and my feelings have calmed down. I stretch and yawn and sigh. Do some skin brushing and patting. It helps me re-inhabit myself. I watch the sky turn colors, the sun rise. Breathe. Settle.
The dream is still brushing at my mind so I look at what I wrote. Interpret what it means to me as best I can in this moment or just leave it open to being an experience without attaching a meaning to it. This helps me breathe again. Brings some sense of place and order to the chaos and fear inside me. I feel where the dream lives in my body. It affects my diaphragm, my belly, my forehead, the back top of my brain. I wiggle back into these places that are holding onto the dream. This helps them change. Then I can begin my day.
5 Things To Do When You Wake In The Morning After A Bad Dream
These are some of my favorite calm the nervous system things to do to come back to myself after a scary dream.
THE ESSENTIALS
Getting out of bed and changing where you are.
Making sure you are warm enough.
Hydrating especially with a beverage that is soothing to you like your favorite tea.
Making yourself comfortable in a place in your home that feels safe.
SKIN BRUSHING
Skin brushing is one of my favorite nervous system soothers. I have a variety of vegetable brushes, shoe brushes, bath brushes with varying degrees of soft to stiff feel. I find different people like different degrees of pressure and type of sensation. If you don’t have a brush that feels right, you can do it with the soft palm side of your fingers.
Essentially it is making moderately slow circles in the same spot several times until you feel ready to move on. I like to overlap the circles. Make sure you are in a comfortable position and your body feels supported. I start with making circles on the hand, then moving up the arm to over the shoulder. Make sure you do all sides of your hand and arm. When you complete one arm switch to the other side. Then I do the same starting at the foot and moving up the leg to the torso. If this perks up your nervous system too much try it with a firmer pressure or make the tempo slower. Always make sure you are comfortable doing this, that your skin feels okay with the amount of pressure. It should feel pleasurable and soothing by the end. Sometimes if you are very agitated it might take a few minutes before your nerves start to calm down.
PATTING
Pat, pat, pat. Lightly tapping your skin with the palm of your hand helps you feel your outsides. It helps define the edge of your body. Patting let’s you know where you are, where you end, helps you feel your body as a separate and whole entity. Both patting and skin brushing wake up and quiet the nervous system in different ways. Feel the differences in your perception of yourself during each practice. Patting, I often start on the scalp, around the skull and then the face, around the back of the neck to the shoulders, then with one hand patting down the front of the arm, around the hand, and up the inside arm to the armpit, then down the side of the arm and up the other side, across the front to the other arm then switch hands and down/up the other arm-hand. Pat down the front of the torso with both hands and up the sides, then turn to the back side of the hands to go down the back and around the buttocks. Then again turn to the palmar side of the hand to go down the back of the legs and up the front, down the outside of the leg, around the foot, and back up the inside of the leg. Or pick a pattern of patting the body that works best for you.
STRETCHING, YAWNING, SOUNDING
This is my normal getting out of bed in the morning practice. Imagine a cat stretching. Can you see that long connectedness, the languorous reaching limbs, the supple spine (of course, cats do have more vertebrae than we do). I do this before I get out of bed. Or maybe you are more of a play with me puppy-pose, dog-person. Don’t think about the stretches you know. Let the animal of your body move into a stretch that doesn’t have an idea of itself. Let your body move the way it wants to, finding tissues that feel their elasticity until aah or ooh or raaar or some other sound emerges from within the you.
Yawn wide. Notice the changes in the back of your throat as you yawn. Let the yawn go down the throat into the chest. Feel the stretching of the cheeks, the squeezing of the eyes, and then the relaxing after-yawn. Let your tongue get plump and rest on the floor of the mouth. And then go back to nose breathing rather than mouth breathing.
I swing my legs over the bed or wherever I am lying and start wiggling and jiggling. I love wiggle-shaking. It mobilizes my joints and shakes tension from the tissues of my body. I like to drop my head forward, let my lips get soft, and make sound through my wiggling lips as I shake out my neck and head. I plant my feet, let the rest of me relax, and do a rapid bounce from my feet and ankles letting everything jiggle. I wiggle my shoulders and hips, letting my legs and arms be loose. I flop my hands around from my wrists and elbows. Sometimes I lie on my back, bring my legs and feet toward the ceiling and jiggle-flop my feet around.
WATCHING THE SUN RISE
There is something about the predawn light that makes me happy. At my house East is behind the trees. The light, at first, is diffuse and then the lower sky reddens and oranges, until the sun actually peeks above the horizon and through the tree trunks with its golden hues. As the sun ascends the sunlight illuminates the trees one at a time. I can watch it move across the forest into the yard, then onto our deck. That’s when it’s great to step outside and let the sunlight bathe my eyes, my face upturned to awaken my nervous system and skin. If it’s warm enough I step barefoot onto the ground and feel the electromagnetic earth energy through your feet. It brings me back into myself, makes me grateful for the glory of the sun and the beauty of the world, reminds me to be present to what is rather than what happened before.
Robbie Svoboda in his book Prakruti: Your Aryurvedic Constitution says “It is best to be awake for sunrise so that the body can begin to synchronize itself with the rhythm of the sun. . . Everyone should rise early and marvel for a few moments over the miracle of existence which is about to begin again, allowing this miracle to instill a deep-felt reverence for all life in the core of your being.” Every sunrise is a blessing. (Unless you need more sleep or a night owl type of person who naturally begins their day later.)
MEETING THE FEELING OF FEAR IN THE BODY
Waking up from a terrifying dream, the feelings are alive in the body. Maybe you remember the story of the dream or maybe you wake with the feeling of it without the details. When you are ready, scan your body for where you feel comfortable and where you feel uncomfortable or disturbed. Notice particular sensations. Then stay in a place that feels comfortable in your body, breathing, being present, noticing sensation, letting that feeling expand if it wants to without pressure. Receive sensation. Notice any shifting in your experience. Stay here to help you remember that you know there are places in your body that feel okay. Then move to an area that is holding the tension of the dream. Notice the shape of it. Notice sensation. Place your hand on the place of tension. Breathe. Be present. Wait for a shift. Or go back to a place of comfort in your body if this is too difficult. Respect your timing and sense of safety. Sometimes being without expectations in the meeting place of your hand and a tense part of your body , with a sense of being together, can feel supportive and healing. Sometimes being in a place of comfort right next to a place of tension can help the tension subside. Do what feels right for you.