How can you stop nightmares?

This wasn’t a question submitted to the site, this was a question asked by a personal friend but I thought it worth sharing as the work we created and put into place has been successful in resolving the matter.

 My friend has recently been suffering from nightmares and asked me what she could do to stop them from plaguing her. She’s quite magically savvy so she already has a dream catcher in place which she frequently smudges with sage to purify. She also bed hops a bit so I was confident the problem was with her rather than her immediate sleeping environment.

The answer I gave was to look at a way of removing herself as the target of the dream. We looked at dreams as being almost akin to a living entity and I asked her what she thought a nightmare would feed on if it was a living creature. We agreed that a nightmare would flourish on negativity, fear and despair. I instructed her to take a pebble and place it into an unsealed jar but before doing so to project those particular emotions into the pebble so they were removed from her and stored next to the bed in the pebble. In the morning after a nightmare free night she sealed the jar to keep the dream locked and brought me the jar. She’s repeated several nights in a row and avoided nightmares ever since.

The problem with this kind of spell is that it will eventually become very repetitive and the effort she puts into projecting her emotions will become routine. The less effective she becomes at giving the dream something to feed on, the more likely she is to go back to having nightmares. I wouldn’t advocate this as a bedtime ritual for that very reason but as a short term chance to get some sleep it’s worked very well.

In this particular instance my friend is giving me the pebbles as a jar of stored bad dreams will come in handy for some of my workings. For those of you without a friendly witch on your doorstep, simply dig a small hole in the garden, unfasten the jar, drop the pebble into the hole and bury it. Reuse the jar as often as you like.

You know what, reading back on this I rather get the feeling I’ve been influenced a bit by Roald Dahl’s perception of dreams in the BFG! But inspiration from any source at all is always welcome to a witch…

Image http://www.deviantart.com/art/Nightmares-157447556

---