How to Work with Hostile Dream Entities

While the standard, modern approach to dreams is to treat everything that appears in them as an aspect of your psychological self, many people experience dreams in which they feel like they are being attacked or confronted by hostile entities. These types of dreams often have such a vivid sense of realness that it is hard not to believe that they are authentic visitations from demons or other malevolent spiritual beings.

It is possible to try and resolve these types of nightmare psychologically, either through interpretation or other therapeutic modalities. However, because the experiences we have in dreams are shaped by our beliefs about our dreams and the kinds of content that concern us in our lives, it is often more effective to respond to hostile dream entities within the framework in which they are seen as fully real.

Historically, traditional oneiromantic and folk magic remedies for warding off nightmare and sleep paralysis demons included a variety of methods, including prayer and calling out the name of the victim; changing the sleeping conditions such as sleeping in a different position or blocking the gaps through which nightmares get into the room; using symbolic apotropaic objects such as iron or knives, often placed under the pillow; attempting to move the body during the nightmare’s attack; and interacting with the nightmare directly by attacking it, removing it, or bargaining with it (for instance by stealing the nightmare’s hat). While based in a spiritual framework, many of these methods worked by either reducing the conditions in which nightmares occur, breaking the state of paralysis or sleep, or promoting lucidity in which the dreamer can take more control of the dream.

In modern, objective approaches to dreamwork, the three main methods for dealing with hostile dream entities extend out of these traditional folk methods. These include attacking or confronting the nightmare, submitting to or sacrificing yourself to the nightmare, or resolving the cause of the nightmare through dialogue with it. Each of these has its advantages and challenges depending on the needs and constitution of the dreamer: for instance, attacking a nightmare can feel empowering, but it can also reaffirm negative ego attitudes. Psychologist Paul Tholey, whose research pioneered these approaches, determined that dialoguing with nightmares is typically the most effective, and can often turn a hostile figure into a friendly one.

These methods for working with hostile dream entities as objectively real beings require the dreamer have some amount of consciousness and control within the dream-state. This can be done through lucid dreaming or astral projection, but as these are often challenging, you can also use dream incubation as well as waking dream techniques such as dream reentry, trance state visualizations, or active imagination in order to enter into the dream with greater awareness and ability to respond.