I've been doing a lot of lucid dreaming of late, setting limits to A Higher Power on what I can dream. It seems to work, but can be intense. But not the exhausting kind.
Yeah, the amount of people who don't cotton on to your leaving, or who forget, or who don't actually notice might surprise you. I still get invitations to UK stuff from people who really ought to know better.
I have found the following ways to combat Repetitive Anxiety Dreams:
1) Give your brain something else to obsess about; fall asleep determinedly imagining something more pleasent. I find continuations of books I've been reading just before bed or computer games I've been playing a lot of recently are the easiest to induce. Tends to only work for the first four hours or so, and delays onset of sleep a bit.
2) Get sufficiently exhausted (or drunk, if that works for you) that you don't remember dreams at all. Probably not a long-term strategy, but useful for particularly upsetting dream patterns.
3) If you are only sleeping lightly during the bad dreams and can wake up, wake up and go and get a drink and attempt to do _something_ useful towards the anxiety subject. This works very well if it's something you can do something about (often I find myself stuck on rehearsing conversations and can send a relevant email or make comprehensive notes and calm my brain right down) but obviously not so well if it's a future thing you can't fix
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1) Give your brain something else to obsess about; fall asleep determinedly imagining something more pleasent. I find continuations of books I've been reading just before bed or computer games I've been playing a lot of recently are the easiest to induce. Tends to only work for the first four hours or so, and delays onset of sleep a bit.
2) Get sufficiently exhausted (or drunk, if that works for you) that you don't remember dreams at all. Probably not a long-term strategy, but useful for particularly upsetting dream patterns.
3) If you are only sleeping lightly during the bad dreams and can wake up, wake up and go and get a drink and attempt to do _something_ useful towards the anxiety subject. This works very well if it's something you can do something about (often I find myself stuck on rehearsing conversations and can send a relevant email or make comprehensive notes and calm my brain right down) but obviously not so well if it's a future thing you can't fix
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