Customer Reviews

What To Do When Dreams Go Bad: A Practical Guide to Nightmares

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What I really liked about this book is that the author doesn't lay out pre-fab interpretations or recipes for dealing with nightmares. I found the book encouraging and inspiring. It's practical, concise, and very helpful without being preachy.

most of the info seemed like just normal intuition.The reading club likely adored her. I was expecting a deeper study. Pleasant book, pleasant experience... but if you are trying to assist a troubled soul... you'll be like me and feel that this under delivered. No malice. It's a casual read for the casual observer. Problem is.... when dark nightmares scare friends enough that they need to figure out the way to stop em or change em or beat them.... this offers up a series of lightweight defenses.

Research in modern sleep and dream laboratories has confirmed that everyone dreams, everyone dreams every night, and everyone spends approximately 100 minutes engaged in dreaming activity.througout the night. What has also been discovered is that the most frequently recalled types of dreams are unpleasant or negatively toned dreams. Researchers have categorized these dreams that "go bump in the night" into three groupings that vary in terms of their intensity of disturbing emotions. The most troubling are night terrors which are associated with the experience of intense terror and are often accompanied by screaming and disorientation upon awakening. The next category involves nightmares which may awaken the dreamer and leave her/him unable to return to sleep readily, and the most typical kind of troubling nocturnal imagery that most of us experience when we wake up in the morning - "bad" dreams.

Dr. Anne Hill, the author of this very well written and useful 62 page book, does an excellent job of surveying what has been discovered about these bad dreams. Metaphorically speaking, she describes what can be done to smooth out the ruffled sheets they leave behind on the bed, and how we can learn to work with these valuable and important messages so they can serve as springboards to improved self understanding. Again speaking metaphorically, if we start getting into credit card debt, we set into motion increasingly higher monetary payments and other undesirable consequences until we settle our Master Card account. The accountant of our dreaming mind keeps sending us these "bad" dream reminders to alert us that we have not been balancing our emotional lives, and will be subject to such future penalties as anxiety, depression, negative self-image etc., If we don't settle up our personal accounts. This very readable, and easy to understand, book provides a nice survey of what has been discovered about bad dreams, and the author discusses some examples from her own life of how she has successfully dealt with such dreams. The reader is left with a sense of optimism that they too will be able to diminish the number of nocturnal "dunning" reminders that they will receive in the future indicating that their balancing sheets have become unbalanced, and need to be dealt with in more effective ways. Dr. Hill devotes several chapters to describing techniques that have worked well for her personally, as well as clients who have sought her out, and she includes some useful reference sources, as well as websites that the interested reader can consult.

For about the cost of two fancy cappuccinos at Starbucks, the reader could buy this handy size volume to keep in their purse or briefcase to share the information with their friends at the breakfast table. If they were alone at the table, they could read through it for suggestions about how to better understand their mood they were in that morning .

All of us dream sometime.. having good and bad dreams. How we all react to these dreams is something that Anne provides some very useful insight as to how we can analyze them and how we can react to them. Having children even make us more aware of the little nightmares our kids have and how we try to help them deal with these nightmares as well. Wonderful insight on dreams!

As a therapist who works with clients to make sense of their dreams, especially nightmares, this book is the perfect resource. It is practical and helpful and completely accessible to the layperson. I highly recommend it to anyone who works with dreams, and I especially recommend it to those who don't. I have recommended it now to several clients who loved it. A great and practical resource.