Negative Dreams: 3 Positive Ways of Dealing with them

Why are dreams so negative? Turn open any book about dreams (here is a list of ten books about dreaming I recommend) and they all guide you into an inner conflict that needs to be resolved. Are we so addicted to the apocalypse? Or is there something else going on? Three Positive ways to counterbalance negative dreams.

#1: Negative Mindset: Human Nature

People are wired to detect negative things. This helps them to survive. So when you dream, you play out possible futures. This way, your neurons can practice.

I remember my dream that predicted the death of my father (I talk about grief dreams in my book A Dreamers’ Guide Through the Land of the Deceased). So how did that negative dream was necessary. Even though I did not understand it when I woke up, five months later at the bed of my father, a shock went through my body: I had experienced this before! It made me immediately phone my sisters and brother so everybody had the time to say a proper goodbye to my father.

#2: Negative dream as a warning sign

When I translated Kasatkin’s book: A Theory about Dreams (click to buy and help support Mindfunda), about dreams and health, it became very clear to me that dreams are prone to get more negative when there is immediate danger for the dreamer. It is like they push on all the buttons and blow the whistles at the same time.

Needless to say there is a close relationship between your dreams and your health. Kasatkin was one of the first psychiatrists who collected dreams of his patients and was able to draw scientific conclusions about it in his book.
You might also want to read 7 symbols that tell you dream is about your health.

#3: Negative dreams as spiritual gateways

“The darkness which clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway of dreams, from which those two twilight figures, the shadow and the anima, step into our nightly visions or, remaining invisible, take possession of our ego-consciousness.”

Carl Jung

In one of my dreams I meet Captain Stubing of the Love Boat. Do you remember the television show? He is standing for a door in a boat. I try to open the door but he prevents me. He looks at me really angry. I wake up agonised…

This was a very negative dream for me. Not being allowed to enter a portal, the door on the boat of life, it made me very sad. But did you know that Captain Stubing, played by Gavin MacLeod, has experienced a spiritual reunion with his wife Patti? the pair got divorced, but Patti asked her friends to pray for their reunion. And because they both experienced a connection, Gavin started to think about his ex wife again. Eventually he called her and they fell back in love again.

So I started to re-interpret this dream as an encouragement to search for a deeper spiritual connection in my own relationship.