Most efficient nightmare repelling techniques?

This post was sparked by a LD I had where everything became gradually darker and darker after becoming lucid. I'd lose vision of a window with light coming in from outside by something like a door closing in front of me, and when I'd open it again it was a whole lot darker. I tried to keep seeing light (because for some reason my dream couldn't just change the lighting while I was looking at it), but my dream was pretty creative in making me lose sight of things. It was obvious my dream was becoming a nightmare, and was doing so fast. I panicked, and I tried to wake up by closing my eyes, then opening them as hard as I could (the first thing I thought of at the time). This only gave me FA's every time I tried it.
This kind of caught me off-guard, I'd never thought about what to do when a LD turns into a nightmare, which was probably why I panicked. That's why I'm opening this thread, to collect experiences that people have had, techniques that can stop a nightmare and turn it into a regular LD, and as a last resort, dream exit strategies.

Something I've heard many times while here is that in a dream, nothing can hurt you, ergo you should not be scared of anything. For me, there's a flaw in this logic. Not once was I afraid of getting hurt during my nightmare, but I was afraid of getting scared, in much the same manner as one who would be uncomfortable watching a horror movie would be scared if they were forced to watch it. It's not fear of pain or fear of death, what caused me to panick was fear of fear. So the realization that it was a dream and that nothing could hurt me in it doesn't work for me, as I'm scared of the nightmare itself.
What's the best way to deal with a nightmare like this? Share your experiences and techniques!

one word, "hate"...

the best thing you can do when an LD goes bad is to get angry, its common knowledge that emotions are amplified in the dreamstae, even in the LD state, thus if you can get your self angry at whatevers causes the scaryness (even slightly angry) this anger will multiply itself and soon hate will set in, hate will essentially make you fearless and you wont have any problems with any nightmare snenerio :)

this is the meathod i use anyway, usually if its darkness or something and i make myself angry i go into a blind fit of rage where the dream starts to blurr and i begin to move really, really, fast, if its darkness thats causing it the blurred state of mind lets me run into another room and suddenly its light again, if its a creature or something hate engulfs me and i simply walk up to it and kill it by picking it up with one hand or something and crushing its neck with my index finger :D think of the angriest you've ever been, now think of that multiplied by 10, or even 100x... blind hatred for anything and everything is what you get, also fearlessness, and yeah, it feels pretty good too :)

Interesting... That's something I can really put to good use! I'll try that next time something like that happens, getting angry shouldn't be much of a problem (since you can just get angry at the dream for turning into a nightmare). But I'm a little scared of the angry me times a hundred. In combination with a world in which I control space-time, I don't think it's going to have a pretty outcome. :P
Although I must say I can only remember one experience where I felt a strong emotion in a dream, and that was love. Quite the opposite of what I want to achieve here, really.

Back when I was younger, my first instinct for nightmares was to escape as fast as possible. Pretty soon, I was used to realizing that when something Horrible was going on, I was usually in a nightmare, and I could wake myself up by opening my eyes like you did. But recently, I've discovered that Realizing I'm in a nightmare is the quickest way for me to turn the situation into a lucid dream. Usually I'm getting chased by something or someThings, realize I'm lucid, and use my oh-so-kickass dream powers to get my revenge, but I think the same principle would apply to an enveloping-darkness nightmare. Realize that it is a nightmare, and you could escape if you want by trying to wake up yourself, or you could try to use your mind and counter-act the darkness by making it recede.
Or, an eaiser way, might be to close your eyes, so that the darkness of the backs of your dream eyelids takes the place of the nightmare darkness, will yourself into another scenario, and then open your eyes calmly, to not open your waking world eyes as well.

All of these should be done with the most strict confidence, though. If you doubt your abilities to pull yourself out of the nightmare, you most likely won't..

"we have nothing to fear but fear itself"

"Me and jesus have one thing in common.." "o yea, whats that?" "we both agree that fear of death is the first step in losing freedom"

It happend to me once on my first extreme lucid dream. it was the first time i could fly and before i took off...i looked at the sky and it was black exept for a huge red eye staring at me, i fell down and had a surge of horrible emotions...but then i got real mad cause it was my lucid dream and it was My mind! so i forced the sky to turn back to normal and took a deep breath and let the feelings go away...i used to only have nightmares almost all the time, but with training in transforming my nightmares they dont come back unless i will them to....which i wouldnt.

Here...i thought you might want to have some more opinions so i looked it up.

I read that it is helpful to create a lucid nightmare with whatever you fear, and face it...be a man about it so to speak and use humor or whatever works for you to make it dull, if you fear "fear" itself you may want to have a "silent hill" type dream if you get the reference, use an LD and not take complete control over it...just go through it conciously, face them as they come and do what you have to do to make its effect go away.

When they always fail....soon the nightmares will subside.