How to Change a Nightmare into Bliss
The nightmare: I was with a bunch of people who were all something like FBI agents. Our goal was to capture someone by cornering him and making him give up. It was working. We just about had him completely cornered,then the dream shifted to a completely different place where we were searching for the same person in a large building with lots of people and corners and floors making it almost impossible to find the person. We thought that it was a bit futile. Then I eyed the suspect walking away with someone else so I stayed in the background so as not to be seen and when he came back in, the room was dark so I went to a corner. Then the dream went from trying to capture him to becoming extremely sinister and horrifying. He killed 3 young police officers in a very cruel way, then became like a super martial arts guy cutting off people’s heads. I tried to get away and then woke up.
Analysis: In the dream world time has a different reality than in the material world so one of the things about a negative dream that is useful is to realize that the end is in the beginning, the end meaning the goal or the purpose of the dream. You first get the purpose of the dream and then you get the pattern. In this dream I was collaborating to corner a criminal. Time is reversed to real life in a negative dream.
Solutions to negative dreams are always positive opposites. So the positive opposite of collaborating to corner a criminal would be to work alone with my own capacities to help someone who is in great need. The dream is telling me to help the person who is in great need, the perpetrator.
In the second part of the dream the criminal shows me just how bad he has become. Dream life is symbolic life so killing in a sinister way means ending relationships in really bad ways. This is what the perpetrator does. At first I am trying to collaborate to bring him to justice, but in the end I am hiding and trying to get away with my life.
The solution is help the person in his relational life by helping him to get out of a pattern than ends up destroying relationships in really negative ways to learning how to create extremely positive relationships. Since I was about to be his victim when I woke up, I now know that I can help him heal himself. In real life I didn’t want to be around this person for fear of him ending relationships right before my eyes again. The fact that my life situation has changed and I received this dream means that the time for healing for him is now.
It is a bit of mystery to me why now but it is one of the things that I have learned to do with dreams is to submit to the message. The reasons usually become clear later if I just trust them. I am fairly certain as to why now, but now I need to meditate on a positive way to do the healing work. Trying to bring a person who ends relationships in a bad way to justice is pretty useless work. That was what I was trying to do before. Doing healing work is much more valuable, but the doors were never open. It is no surprise that the dream came as a nightmare because without a nightmare I wouldn’t have been clear on the issue and what needed to be done.
My initial work is going to have to be to clear the negative emotions associated with the bad relationship.
Richard Hastings is an expert in change work and dream work and author of Dreams for Peace. He is a 
Dreams For Peace 
Hi Richard,
I came across this post accidentally when I was sharing a link to your apocolyptic dream post.
I notice that this was posted in June in 2007, nearly ten years ago, and two years before I found your blog in 2009 so I’ve never come across this post previously.
Everything you write here is inspiring and I have something to add about the Martial Arts situation and about time and patterns of behaviour. I’m also thinking about the concept of finding the positive opposite in a negative dream and also about malicious murder as a metaphor.
I wrote about all this on a dreamwork blog for using a dreamwork as a self-help approach to personal transformation. Here is the link in case you’d like to check it out. https://rperrydreamwork.wordpress.com/2017/06/15/how-to-use-dreams-to-understand-the-uncomprehendable/
Rachel