How to end recurring nightmares

William A. Ayres

Not long ago, I had a dream that left me shaking with fright. I was on a dimly lighted street in a big city late at night, when two ominous figures emerged from the darkness and came toward me from different directions. I was about to be mugged!

I tried to cry out but couldn't emit a sound. As the shadowy figures closed in on me, I felt for my wallet, believing it contained over $200. But there was no place to hide my money. The experience seemed so real—and I suffered the agony of thinking it was real—until I finally woke up.

I tossed off the whole thing as just a dream. But some time later when the dream recurred and was just as frightening, I decided I needed to do something about it. I knew it was not necessary for me to give in to any evil influence either when awake or when asleep. In No and Yes, Mary Baker Eddy states, "God holds man in the eternal bonds of Science,—in the immutable harmony of divine law" (p. 26). While I was pondering this message, some helpful ideas came to me.

I recalled reading a testimony many years before in which a woman had recurring nightmares of a thundering herd of wild horses charging down upon her. The experience seemed so real each time the dream came that she suffered just as though the event were really happening. When she talked with a Christian Science practitioner about the problem, the practitioner reminded her of a passage in Science and Health that reads, "Resist evil—error of every sort—and it will flee from you" (p. 406).

The practitioner told her that the next time the scene occurred she should turn and face the wild horses. "Oh, I couldn't do that!" the woman said with conviction. "They would run over me." Then both she and the practitioner laughed as they realized there were no real horses to run over her! The dream did come again, but this time the woman turned and faced the thundering horses. The dream promptly ended and never recurred.

From this, I realized that my remedy was to maintain the unreality of the experience, whether I was awake or asleep. I decided that if I should ever dream of those shadowy figures again, I, too, would take a stand against their reality. I Knew I could not experience any mental or physical discomfort from nothingness!

Not long after, I did have the dream again. But, even though I was asleep, the truth that I had declared when I was awake came to my rescue as I thought, "This is a dream and therefore unreal." I was immediately released from the bondage of the dream. I felt a great freedom. The dream never came again. I had learned a good lesson: whether awake or asleep, when one faces a false concept with the truth, the nothingness of the mistaken concept becomes evident. Evil cannot persist when the truth is understood.

A still greater lesson comes when we understand that unpleasant or painful experiences in daily living are no more real than the sleeping nightmare. They, too, can be dispensed with by knowing that evil has no foundation in fact and therefore is nonexistent.

On page 250 of Science and Health, Mary Baker Eddy writes: "Now I ask, Is there any more reality in the waking dream of mortal existence than in the sleeping dream? There cannot be, since whatever appears to be a mortal man is a mortal dream."

Whatever the state of consciousness—be it a sleeping dream or "the waking dream of mortal existence"—the remedy for discord is to replace the false concept with the truth of being: namely, that man is the likeness of omnipotent, omnipresent God, who is good. When we do this, the end of the discord is assured.

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