A nightmare?

I’m panting, sweating, running as fast as I can down a dark mountain path, running from something. It might be a big black bear. My heart pounds. I run faster. There is no moon, few stars, I’m afraid it is going to kill me. I must run, run faster, run for my life. It is going to kill me! It is getting closer.

I wake up. Alone in bed. Scared, shaking.

I climb out of bed, walk across the hardwood floor to the door, slowly open it so it won’t wake my sister in the other bed, and creep along the upstairs hall to my parents’ bedroom.

I knock on the door and climb into bed with my parents.

“I had a bad dream.”

“It’s okay, just go back to bed, you’ll be okay in the morning.”

“But I’m scared, I had a bad dream. I want to sleep in your bed.”

I tell my mother about the bear chasing me.

She listens, then says, “It is just a bad dream. Go back to bed, you’ll be okay.”

She doesn’t believe me. She thinks it is nothing. It is not nothing. It is terrifying and might kill me. I go back to bed and am wide-eyed all night. I’m sure the bear will kill me if I drift off to sleep.

Once when I babysat for my young niece and nephew they told me to leave the lights on all night. I sat down on the bed and asked my nephew why he wanted the lights left on. He told me that a ghost was hiding in his closet and might come out and get him if it was dark. I asked if he had bad dreams. He said yes and told me how something was chasing him in his dream.

I told him about my childhood dreams. I told him, “In your dream, he’s chasing you because you are afraid. If you turn around in your dream and face him, ask him what his name is, he will go away. You have to stop running and face him. Then he will go away.”

Several months later I asked my sister if he was still having bad dreams and needing the light on in his room at night. She said he was over that phase.

What is it that chases us? It seems to me that when we dam up our emotions, afraid to express them, they become re-activated during sleep and appear as dreams. The running is the physical expression of fear, the tension in the body, the rapid breathing. When we stop running, face the fear and feel the feelings, they can be integrated.

It is a lifelong process—first we save ourselves from the potential consequences of our feelings by suppressing them, then later we have to face and integrate them. As my spiritual teacher Baba Hari Dass used to say, we have to “Face, Fight and Finish.”