You probably already know this to some extent, so my apologies if it sounds obvious:
The fear of the dream recurring is likely to be the main thing that could make it recurr. Naturally we can become obsessive about our fears and this is generally counter-productive; you need only look out the window these days to see this in practice.
Calm kind of has to be practised and it has to be consciously asserted. The most important thing is to really convince yourself that the fear doesn't make sense and that you can overcome it as soon as you want to and as soon as you are ready to. You may think you're never ready to do so, but you will be. In recent years I overcame a phobia I had my entire life, so I am utterly convinced that we can overcome any fear if we put our mind to it, and hope you will be so convinced too. Be realistic too, and accept that it takes time to deal with these mental things.
In your particular case, I think there are two potential avenues to start with while awake: you can start by either finding this comic strip that scared you this time and analysing it and seeing why it reminds you of this other traumatising picture and trying to distance yourself from your fear bias of it while you do this, or you can get rid of it and essentially "delete" this specific physical trigger... Personally though, I know I'd try the first thing, because knowing myself, if I threw it away I'd still have a vivid enough memory of whatever the other picture is anyway, especially with a fresh reminder like that, and it's not going to be a specific trigger being gone that solves the issue.
I think I do have to ask, the traumatic picture in question, if it's so easy to find, I am struggling to think of what type of content it could be... Is it extremely violent or inappropriately sexual or some combination? I can't think of anything like that can be found easily without even knowing that it's there in the first place. Or is it nothing of that sort? But again, if you have to go looking for it, then that should be a reassuring thing, because it means that you're not likely to just see it by accident anyway.
You know, there are smells that remind of some traumatic events in my life, but you know, I thought those smells were nice before any of that. So I don't want to let one bad experience ruin what has always been a nice thing for me. I make a mental cut off of the bad thing from the thing I like. It takes time, but it's completely doable.
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