Last night I had a nightmare.  I have no recollection of the horror at all but I awoke in the wee hours of the morning and I was sobbing, full on heaving sobs, and tears were streaming down my face.  I can honestly say I’m relieved that I don’t remember the theme of the night terror that I survived. Naturally, it got me thinking about nightmares and why they occur.

Nightmares are simply a combination of our history of events and many of those nightmares are caused by the stress of those same calamities.  Whether we realize it or not, we may be dealing with some issues that take hold of our subconscious and wreak havoc in our dream world.  We may not even comprehend that we are holding onto so much of what happened in our day, or our week, but it builds up like a brick wall that crumbles in our sleep and the shrapnel plummets into our waking moments.

Stress is fickle creature.  It can inhabit our daily life as much as it creeps into the blissful hours that should be our time to recharge.   When I went to bed, I carried with me each particle of energy-draining angst that I had accumulated throughout my day and the stress of what has been happening with my home.  Nightmares and dreams paint a picture of what is happening in our life.  Whether that portrait is drenched in vibrant colors or tarnished with mottled shades of black and grey, the visions in our sleep depict our mood and illustrate the tension we are storing in your body.

I am in awe of the seemingly limitless catastrophes that a human body can endure and process.  Any type of mental anguish it represses during the day will certainly appear in our unconscious state giving us signs that we are walking on a ledge.

We need to find a way to clear our negative energy before the weight of our day begins to pull down the blankets of our eyelids.  We will at least have a fighting chance of supplying the artist in our sleep with a pallet of spirited rich colors instead of the monochromatic, threatening spatters of charcoal and black.  If we can free our head of that ticking time bomb called stress, we can reclaim our restful night of unadulterated sleep.