Osho Quotes on Nightmares and Fears

Osho Quotes on Nightmares

1. When you go to sleep, many of you suffer from nightmares. Many write to me, “What to do about nightmares?” You cannot do anything directly about nightmares; you will have to change your pattern of life. Your nightmares are produced by what you are doing and thinking in the day. Your night is simply a reflection. If your day is beautiful, blissful, loving, you can’t have nightmares. And if your day is silent, still, utterly thoughtless, contentless — absolutely pure, whole, knowing no disturbance — all dreams will disappear. In the night you will have a dreamless sleep.
2. If you can love and be loving, irrespective of whom, then your second body can have a sense of well-being, a positive at-easeness. Then there are no nightmares. Dreams become a poetry. Then something happens in your second body, and the perfume of it not only pervades you but others also. Wherever you are, the perfume of your love spreads. And of course it has its own response, its own echoing.
3. Looking at a Zen painting you will be surprised because the painting brings to you something of the man who has painted it. If you look at modern painting, that too brings something to you. If you look at a modern painting long enough, you will start feeling a little crazy. If you put too many modern paintings in your bedroom, beware, you will have nightmares. Those paintings will start entering into your dreams. You cannot look at a modern painting for long; you have to move. You start feeling weird, something is wrong, something is bizarre. The modern painter is insane. He is painting out of his insanity. If you look at a Zen painting, a silence oozes out of it, suddenly something beautiful surrounds you. You are transported to another consciousness. The painting carries something of the touch of the Master. The painting has been done in deep meditation; the painting has been done by one who has arrived. Gurdjieff used to call such art “objective art”. When somebody who has attained to consciousness does something, that something becomes objective art. Looking at that thing, you will have some glimpse of the Master. The Master may have been dead for three thousand years, that doesn’t matter. The painting, the statue, the carving will represent him, and through it you can again become connected to him. If you know how to meditate with a painting, it will be easier.
4. Unless one knows that ‘I am immortal,’ that ‘I have been here forever and I am going to be here forever,’ one is bound to remain in anxiety and anguish and misery and fear and all kinds of nightmares. But the moment you know that you are not the body, not the mind, but an eternal soul. All dark clouds disappear. For the first time existence becomes full of sun, full of flowers, full of light.
5. Who are you? If you drop the ideas of being a doctor, engineer, a professor, then suddenly you will become aware of a certain emptiness within you… you don’t know who you are. And what type of life is this in which you are not even aware of who you are? One goes on avoiding this emptiness within oneself. One goes on fixing patches all around oneself, so from nowhere can you see this inner void. One goes on clinging to actions, and actions are not more than dreams — both good and bad. Good actions, good dreams; bad actions, nightmares. But both are dreams — and the whole effort in the East has been this: to know the dreamer. Who is this dreamer? Who is this consciousness on which dreams come, flow and go?
6. Awareness is what the alchemists have been searching for — the elixir, the nectar, the magical formula that can help you to become an immortal. In fact everybody is immortal but we are living in a mortal body and we are so close to the body that the identity arises. There is no distance to see the body as separate. We are so immersed in the body, rooted in the body, that we start feeling we are the body — and then the problem arises: we start becoming afraid of death. Then all the fears, all the nightmares, come in its wake. Awareness creates the distance between you and your body. It makes you watchful of both your own body and mind.
7. Sadness is there, anger is there: just watch. And be ready for a surprise; if you can watch, and your watchfulness is uncontaminated, is pure — you are really not doing anything but simply looking — the anger will slowly pass by. The sadness will disappear, and you will be left with such a clean consciousness. You were not so clean before because the possibility of anger was there. Now that possibility has become actual and it is gone with the anger. You are far cleaner. You were not so silent, so peaceful; now you are. Sadness had taken up some energy. It would not have allowed you a deep sense of happiness, it would have clouded your consciousness. And all the other negative emotions are eating your energy. They are all there because you have repressed them, and they are repressed so you don’t let them out. You have closed the door and you have put them in the basement; they cannot escape. Even if they want to escape, you won’t let them out. And they will disturb your whole life. In the night they will become nightmares, ugly dreams. In the day they will affect your actions. And there is always a possibility that some emotion may become too big to control. You have been repressing and repressing and repressing, and the cloud is becoming bigger. And a point comes when you cannot control it anymore. Then something happens, which the world will see as you doing, but only those who know can see you are not doing it: you are under a very great impulsive force. You are behaving like a robot; you are helpless.
8. To experience immortality is the only way to get rid of all fears and anxieties, because they are all rooted in the fear of death. Once you know there is no death and no birth you are free from fear, you are free from hell. You are free from all kinds of nightmares. A great peace settles in, and that peace is not the peace of a cemetery, it is a peace which sings and dances and celebrates. It is a peace full of life.
9. A dream is the boiling unconscious. The whole day you go on repressing, and in the night, when you fall asleep — when the repressor falls asleep — all that is repressed starts surfacing. That’s what your dreaming is. And if your dreams are nightmares that simply means you are REALLY repressing. Your repression is dangerous. You are repressing neurotic things inside your unconscious, and the deeper they go the more damage they do.
10. One can be a solitary, but that does not bring solitude. Solitariness is just physical aloneness, solitude is spiritual aloneness. If you are just lonely… and you will be if you have renounced the world. If you have escaped from the world out of fear you will be lonely, the world will haunt you, and all kinds of desires will surround you. You will suffer millions of nightmares, because whatsoever you have renounced cannot be dropped so easily. Renunciation is repression and nothing else. And the more you repress a thing, the more you need to repress it. And the more you go on repressing it, the more powerful it becomes. It will erupt in your dreams, it will erupt in your hallucinations. People living in the monasteries start hallucinating, people going to the Himalayan caves sooner or later are no more in contact with reality. They start creating a reality of their own — a private reality, a fictitious reality.
11. Even though a person somehow manages to live normally, deep down nobody is normal. They all have nightmares, they all have fear, they all have greed, they all feel insecure.
12. If love happens, fear will disappear from the mind. You will have a life of freedom, at ease, at-homeness. No fear will come, no nightmares. If the prayer happens then fear completely disappears, because with prayer you become one — you start feeling a deep relationship with the whole. From the spirit, fear disappears; the fear of death disappears when you pray — never before it. And when you meditate even fearlessness disappears. Fear disappears, fearlessness disappears. Nothing remains. Or. only the nothing remains. A vast purity; virginity; innocence.
13. Man is a fragile flower. Any stone can crush him. Any accident and you are gone. Once you understand it…. Even if you feel very afraid, what to do? The night is dark, the path unknown, no light to light the path, nobody to guide you, no map, so what to do? If you like crying and weeping, cry and weep, but that helps nobody. Better accept it and grope in the dark. Enjoy while you are. Why waste this time for security, because security is not possible. This is the wisdom of insecurity. Once you understand it, accept it, you are freed from fear. It happens always on the war front, when soldiers go to fight, that they are very afraid because death is there waiting for them. Maybe they will never come back again. They tremble, they cannot sleep, they have nightmares. They dream again and again that they have been killed or crippled, but once they reach the front, all fear disappears. Once they see that death is happening, people are dying, other soldiers are dead, their friends may be dead, bombs are falling and bullets passing, within twenty-four hours they settle; all fear gone. They accept it; they start playing cards and bullets are passing. They drink tea and they enjoy it as they have never enjoyed it before because this may be their last cup. They joke and laugh, they dance and sing. What to do? When death is there, it is there. This is insecurity. Accept it, then it disappears.
14. For centuries, man has lived in ignorance, in darkness. And in that darkness and ignorance he has been spinning and weaving dreams, nightmares, and he is suffering them. His nightmare may be just a dream, but his suffering is true. To me, the definition of a religious man is one who has come out of dreams, one who has come out of sleep, one who is awake, one whose eyes are open. And he lives with this awareness. His every act is full of his awareness, is luminous with his awareness. Then nothing can go wrong.
15. Meditation is an effort to be awake, to be alert, to be conscious. Anything else should follow, but cannot precede it: love can follow it, friendship can follow it, worship can follow it, prayer can follow it, gratitude can follow it. But everything has to follow only when you have attained an integrated consciousness; otherwise you are having only dreams, nightmares, and you are believing in them as if they are real.
16. It is just your mind which goes on collecting a thousand and one things, unnecessarily. It is a junkyard. You have seen a film in which there are dangerous scenes, you have read a novel in which there are murders and rapes and all kinds of crimes. You have been reading the newspaper every day. All this goes on collecting inside your mind, and in your sleep time, the mind wants to unload itself. Your dreams are nothing but an unloading of the mind. If you don’t collect unnecessary junk, you won’t have dreams. I have not dreamt for years, and not to dream gives a different quality to your sleep. It is light and very sweet, almost musical, a poetry without any words, a meditation of immense silence and serenity.
17. To be in the company of a master is the greatest blessing possible, because being in the company of one who is awakened, the possibility opens up for you also to be awakened. One who is awake can make you awake, because awakening is contagious. He can shake you out of your dreams and nightmares. But the fool can live in the company of a master his whole life and miss. How does he miss? Because with the master also he is connected through the head — that is his way of missing the master.
18. To be with a master simply means to live with someone who is awake, who is no more asleep, whose dreams are finished, whose nightmares are over. And just being in tune with the master slowly slowly wakes you up. The very energy of the master starts penetrating your being. Slowly slowly it seeps into your heart, slowly slowly it gives you a new heart, a new beat. And you cannot remain long with a master without becoming awake, because he is continuously shouting, calling you forth to wake up, calling you forth to come out of your grave.
19. Truth comes like light and all nightmares and all dreams and all darknesses disappear. And to live in truth is the only way to live. All other ways are only ways to die. The person who is not living his truth is simply living unnecessarily. He is a burden to himself and a burden to the earth, he is a curse to himself and a curse to others. The person who finds his truth and starts living it is a blessing to himself and a blessing to the whole universe.
20. Until a pillar of consciousness arises in you, you will live in dreams, in nightmares, and your life will be a wastage. It will not come to fulfillment, to contentment, to a deep realization of organic unity with the cosmos.
21. Unless one becomes a buddha one has not lived and one has not known what life is. One has dreamed of course — dreams of a thousand and one things — but one has been asleep. And whether you dream beautiful dreams or ugly dreams it does not matter. In the morning of buddhahood, all those dreams, both good and bad, sweet and bitter, golden dreams and nightmares, will be known as false, illusory. It was a self-deception, and the capacity to deceive oneself is enormous. Beware of it! One can even dream that one is awake, one can even dream that one has become a buddha. That is the ultimate trick the mind can play upon you.
22. You may be having nightmares; in those moments you feel, “How to drop out of the dream?” — but you have beautiful dreams also; not only hellish dreams, you have heavenly dreams. And that’s the problem: unless you become aware that even a heavenly dream is a dream and useless, you are not on the deathbed. Your desire continues, you go on watering the world of dreams, feeding it, helping it to grow.
23. Look at the statue of a Buddha. Just sit in front of the statue of a Buddha, silently watching it, and you will be surprised: something in you also starts settling; something in you also becomes quiet, still, silent. Gurdjieff used to call this “objective art”, because the person who has created the statue has created it out of his own meditation; it is a work of meditation. It may not represent exactly the physiology of Gautam the Buddha — it does not really represent it; it is symbolic. It represents his meditation, not his body; not his mind but his very being. It represents his stillness. “Sitting silently, doing nothing, spring comes and the grass grows by itself.” It represents that silence. He is not doing anything. Sitting in front of a Buddha statue you will fall into a deep silence. Sitting in front of a Picasso painting you will be in a turmoil; you will start getting angry, you will start getting restless. You cannot move into meditation; it is impossible. If you keep Picasso paintings in your bedroom you will have nightmares!
24. Whether you create, or you observe an objective piece of creativity, meditation should be the key. Without it, mind can only spread on the canvas its nightmares. Most of the paintings of the great painters like Paul Gaugin or Picasso are almost like vomit. They could not contain their agony and suffering — it was so much they threw it on the canvas to get relief. The real objective art is not a relief; it is not a sickness that you want to get rid of. It is a blissfulness that you want to share. And by sharing, it grows; you have more of it, the more it is shared.
25. The more you become alert about your dreams, the more you will see gaps arising in your consciousness when dreams are not there and reality can be approached. But we have great investments in our dreams. We may be afraid of nightmares, but we are not yet fed-up with dreaming. We still go on cherishing sweet dreams.
26. In a Himalayan cave you will be dreaming sweet dreams. That’s what people are doing in the monasteries — dreaming beautiful dreams of God, of angels, of heaven, of eternal peace and joy. In the world, people are suffering from nightmares — the nightmares of the share market, the nightmares of power politics. It is easier to be awakened here. If you cannot awaken here, you cannot wake up anywhere else. But remember, let me repeat it again, there is no other reality, there is only one reality. But the one reality can be seen in two ways: with sleepy eyes, dreamy eyes, eyes full of dust, and then what you see is distorted; and the same reality can be seen without sleep, without dreaming eyes, without dust. Then whatsoever you see is the truth — and truth liberates.
27. Ordinarily we are in a sleep, dreaming a thousand-and-one things. The purpose of sannyas is to shake you, shock you, and to awaken you. Just a glimpse of awakening and all dreams become futile. Then nightmares are nightmares and sweet dreams are also nightmares. The first taste of awakening is satori; and remember, that is the goal for you. It has to be achieved, and in this very life. So don’t postpone it, don’t postpone it even for tomorrow. Start working from this very moment. Go as deeply as possible into meditations. Bring your total energy. Jump wholeheartedly. Don’t hold back, don’t go halfheartedly, because only passionate intensity brings fulfillment.