I Want to Hear About Your Nightmares
I say this often, because it’s true: nightmares are one of the most honest windows into a person’s emotional life. Again and again, I’ve seen how the images that terrify us in the dark of the night reveal the emotions we avoid during the day.
Most people assume nightmares are random, just the brain misfiring or replaying nonsense.
But in my work, I’ve learned something different:
Nightmares Have Emotional Signatures.
They often point back to unresolved patterns, recurring fears, and unprocessed experiences that still live inside the nervous system.
What Your Nightmares Are Really Telling You
When I sit with clients, they sometimes begin with, “It probably doesn’t mean anything, but…” and then they tell me a story that reveals everything.
One client will describe standing in the kitchen arguing with her mother. In the dream she wants to scream so hard, but no sound comes out. Her hands shake as she furiously packs her suitcase, desperate to leave. She wakes up breathless, heart pounding, long before she ever reaches the door.
Another dreams of a snake, enormous, dark, closing in. A wave of horror flods him, and he can’t move fast enough to escape. He wakes terrified, even though he can’t remember ever being harmed by a snake in his life.
Someone else dreams of being underwater. It begins in a gentle swim in a quiet lake, but suddenly the surface disappears. Light narrows to a pinhole. No matter how hard she kicks, she sinks. She wakes gasping for air, sheets twisted around her like ropes.
And then there’s the dream when you are walking into a room full of people you care about, only to realize no one wants you there. They whisper. They drift into conversations without you, leaving you invisible and unwanted. You wake with a heaviness you can’t quite name.
All these dreams look wildly different on the surface.
A fight. A creature. Drowning. Being left out.
Different settings, different characters, different fears.
But underneath, the emotional patterns are unmistakable.
Nightmares Speak in Emotions, Not Storylines
The woman packing her suitcase is dreaming in the language of defensive rage. Our primal instinct to protect oneself, to leave, to stop from being hurt.
The person being chased by the snake is dreaming in the language of fear, the kind that follows you no matter what you do.
The drowning dreamer is trapped in helplessness, a sense of suffocation that didn’t start in the lake but somewhere much earlier, maybe in a childhood that felt too heavy, or a relationship that swallowed him whole.
And the one standing in the room full of familiar faces, unseen and unwanted, is dreaming in the language of rejection, a painful wound that often hides beneath even the brightest, most accomplished lives.
Nightmares don’t replay our memories.
They replay our emotions we haven’t fully processed.
The subconscious mind doesn’t bother with exact details. It cares about the feeling that never got resolved, the ones we pushed down, smoothed over, or told ourselves weren’t important.
So the argument with your mother might not be the real story.
The snake might not be the threat.
The water might not be the danger.
The crowd might not be the problem.
The emotion is the message.
How Exploring Nightmares Can Help
The subconscious doesn’t bother with exact details. It cares about the feelings we pushed down, smoothed over, or told ourselves weren’t important.
When I explore nightmares with clients, we don’t treat them like random fear-movies. We treat them as emotional maps. Each image, each chase, each suffocating moment points back to something real, alive beneath the surface.
Once we follow that thread, the nightmare stops being just a terror in the dark. It becomes a guide, a messenger, a doorway into healing what the waking mind has learned to avoid.
Nightmares are not here to punish us. They are here to speak. And when we listen, when we understand their emotional language, we find the threads of fear, rage, helplessness, and rejection — and the power to work through them.