Over lots of years I was able to lucid dream, and I could continue the same dream over several nights.

As I fell asleep I’d reply the last thing I remembered and the dream would start up. I could shape the dreams. These were not super vivid, not were they associated with loss. They were just regular though sometimes odd dreams that I enjoyed having. That I knew I could change my dreams helped my late wife one time.

She began having nightmares. Well actually she began having bad dreams and the next morning would not talk to me ‘because you didn’t help me in my bad dream’. …. anyway, the nightmares arrived, she’d wake shouting and one night got out of bed and pulled the bedroom curtains, and the curtain pole, straight off the wall. She was very very scared.

I got her to tell me what she had seen, where it was, what the bad things looked like and she gave a lot of detail.

One night, as we settled to sleep I asked her to lie still and close her eyes. I described back to her what she had told me. I said to imagine the scene she told me about, she said she could see it. I told her to look to her left and she would see a large soldier. This guy had guns, knives, grenades, armour. I told her to look to her right and she would see another heavily armed soldier. I told her that these guys would protect her, that they would kill anything that tried to hurt her. She drifted off to sleep. That night the nightmare did not happen. So we tried again the next night. Did the same describing, she said she could see everything. The nightmare did happen. But she did not wake up. In the morning she said the soldiers had killed all the bad stuff. She never had another nightmare.

Weird? Yes. True? Yes.