Dreams prepare you for current and future events in your waking life. They also point out to you areas in your life that need to be healed, or worked upon. Nightmares are usually your deepest fears symbolized by frightening, horrifying images. If you learn to face your fears instead of running away or ignoring them, then the nightmares will disappear or evolve into regular non-threatening images. Nightmares are your wake-up call to problems you need to solve in waking life. Why are they so frightening? Because that's what most effectively gets our attention.

Unfortunately, we don't usually pay attention until our dreams get to this point, and then we sit up and take notice. It's similar to the way in which we pay attention to our bodies...pain may be unpleasant, but we finally realize that there is a health problem or njury that needs to be tended to, and then take care of it. The pain may start out mild, but the longer we ignore the problem, the worse it gets until we simply must take care of the problem. It's the same situation with dreams; we may get numerous messages in regular, non-frightening dreams, but not pay attention. Finally, when the situation gets to a vital point in which a problem must be taken care of pronto, we will get the nightmare. One of my favorite quotes is this:

The Fates lead him who will; him who won't, they DRAG!

Once you get used to paying attention to more subtle messages in regular dreams, you won't have to be "hit over the head" with a nightmare to clue into a problem, and take care of it. In this way, just as pain helps you avert a more serious physical disaster, nightmares prevent a problem in your waking life from getting advanced to the point of not being able to fix it.

You can learn helpful techniques for conquering your nightmares by finding information on dream symbols and learning how to interpret your dreams, so you can start learning without having to be "hit over the head" with a nightmare. If you start learning to clue in earlier to what your dreams are telling you, you might feel much more in-tune with your intuition and what is going on in your life ever since. It clears away a lot of the confusion.