Nightmares can be cathartic, right? They are guides, like all dreams, to the fears I need to address to take care of myself. Sharing or writing down your dreams can be super helpful.

@skye724 I guess they can. After my divorce, all kinds of things scare me. Being alone scares me the most.

@Erick67 I love being on my own. Here's the thing: your nightmares are a signal, a flare being shot to the sky from deep within you. Write them down. Share them. Talk about them. Then you have power over the dream, rather than the dream owning you. Being alone can be rich and even fun. LIke Winston Churchill said, "If you're going through hell, keep going." Often, and I can only speak for myself, I find that if I just keep going forward and feeling the pain, the pain passes out through me, and I'm on the other side of it. I sometimes think we get stuck because we avoid pain - and that's where the nightmare comes in. Hope I'm making some kind of sense here.

@skye724 you are. Being single after having been married for 22 years and together for 25 will take a lot of readjusting. I am doing it. I guess all I need is time.

@Erick67 And patience with yourself. Be gentle with you. Do things you love to do. There's no way to rush the process. And your dreams are key to understanding who you really are. After all, even nightmares are part of us, aching to be heard.

Hmmm...how can we be certain?

@skye724 Of what?

@Coffeo Sleep and dreaming are the greatest mysteries of being human. Itl is well worth considering dreams as extensions of life, rather than just mind cartoons. If dreams are real, the events in them cannot simply be discarded. It's such a rich topic.

@skye724 I am not saying that the contents of dreams are of no value. I wish I could remember mine better. In my teens I could remember them so well that some of them ran to two or three pages when I wrote the down, sometimes with illustrations.

Are they?

@skye724 I'd be dead many times if they were real ?