My Story of Overcoming my Nightmares so far (Part 1)

I'm here for a quite long time now( about 6 month now) but was hardly active in these time. I was just too busy. But i'm glad to be back again with more motivation, efforts and time than I ever had for this topic. I was interested in dreams since I was a child. That was always a mysterious field to me that I wanted to get to know better. And for a couple of years now since I experienced to become lucid in my own dreams it was my wish to control that state one day. But since I suffered as a child from night terror and nightmares I also had fears falling asleep although like I already mentioned I love dreaming and especially the state of you while you are asleep.Though I have my problems with sleeps I can't cast the fact aside that I still wish to become lucid while dreaming.

Primarily I just wanted to share my experience with nightmares and how I began to get rid of it slowly now so I can devote myself to LD again since I'm finished with school soon and after that i'm gonna take very much time for about one or two years or even more to just do what i'm really interested in like traveling or learning stuffs which i'm truly interested in. That also mean that I have enough time to attain my goal in being aware that I'm dreaming and after that while I'm still dreaming to handle my unconsciousness.

However, those nightmares are such a pain for me and I suffer in a mentally way as well as in a physically way quite a lot. Although I can say that I get enough sleep every time I wake up I'm so indescribable tired and under shock that I can't do anything except looking in the emptiness. After that I'm kinda paralyzed for the rest of the day and must think of those nightmares and why they came up because most of them occur constantly. It was quite obvious that my nightmares were a reflection of all my fears or rather of only one fear I have all the time. What a surprise right?:panic:

Whatsoever thanks to a method with the name 'Imagery- Rehearsal- Therapy' where i must write down what happened in my nightmares( of course I regularly do it whether it's a nightmare or not) and then I worked with a therapist on the dream signs which caused anxiety attacks. After we barely examine my nightmares and discuss the dream signs which repeat always in those nightmares we began to develop a plan to overcome it. Through visualizing my nightmare into a situation with less danger and with less anxiety it should help me to get into a situation where i can no longer fell any danger. They recommend me to repeat this technique as often as i could to apply it one day on a nightmare while I'm dreaming.
At the beginning it wasn't successful at all because it was like I would daydreaming all day long but visualizing those nightmares was for me kinda hard und painful although I was awake and sometimes it got so worse that I even forget that I was 'daydreaming' so I totally freaked out... And I was just about to give up until I gave it a last try lo and behold! The numbers of my nightmares dropped :banana: For me it was really a miracle :D hehehe But I still have nightmares during the week but luckily not every day anymore. But I don't know why that technique was suddenly so successful for me in the end. Maybe one day I get to know the answer.

All in all I'm even more motivated now that I can manage to become lucid while dreaming one day although I lately have taken some pills where the side effects were getting nightmares :( But that couldn't stop me from working on overcoming my nightmares. Instead it gave me the right amount of energy to work even harder with pleasure on my goals! I still can't grasp it how much I could achieve under my circumstances in such a short time and I'm also really proud of the results!

I'm very open and would appreciate it to receive some advice how you personally get rid of your nightmares and I also don't mind to receive critics on my method so I can improve my technique :)