craven wrote:thanks for your response`s i dont have the night mare anymore and havent for a long time im 28 now nothing about the dream is remotely scary now but i do remember it very well, so well i could paint it and i intend to. has anyone explored a nightmare before? what was the result.
When I was a child I had a recurring nightmare which led me to rather spontaneously learn a form of lucid dreaming. In retrospect the nightmare wasn't that scary: I dreamt I was babysitting in a strange house (I was actually much to young to babysit) and when I opened a kitchen cupboard, a big scary lion jumped out and chased me all over the house. When someone suggested to me I might change the dream's outcome, I simply did (I didn't know lucid dreaming can take some work, so for me it didn't take much work). I don't remember exactly how I changed the dream, just that I confronted the lion instead of running from it and wasn't bothered by the dream after that. But I didn't explore the significance of the dream. Just a childhood fear I guess, like the 'monsters' under the bed.
As an adolescent I was haunted by a different dream, but it's significance was so clear It didn't need much exploration. I was struck by a mysterious illness at the time, there was no certainty whatsoever how that illness would progress, if it would get worse or if I would ever get well again (by the way, I did). It didn't take a hypnotist to figure out why I was having dreams about walking along in and unexpectedly seeing a deep ravine (think Grand Canyon kind of deep) open right at my feet.
If reliving your dream wouldn't be traumatizing, it might be a good idea to try and learn lucid dreaming, 'conjure' up the dream and explore it with your adult mind. Dreaming it instead of remembering it might lead you to new insights, especially if you have enough controll over your dream to, for example, explore rooms in the house, or the environment of the house, you haven't been before.
I don't have experience with the lucid dreaming file on this site, but I can recommend the book 'Lucid Dreaming' by Pamela Ball, which aside from giving instruction on how to achieve lucid dreaming also gives some pointers on how to interpret dreams, lucid or not. Maybe you could use a book like that and use the lucid dreaming file to speed up the process.