Man, let me tell you about this recurring nightmare. For almost nine solid months, I was living with the damn Exorcism Dream.
Every time, same scene. I was pinned down. Not by a monster, but by this vague, shouting priest figure. I wasn’t scared of the priest, I was scared because I couldn’t move, couldn’t shout back, couldn’t even blink properly. It was full-on sleep paralysis married to religious shouting. I’d wake up sweating, panicked, and genuinely pissed off because it wrecked the whole damn week.
I knew I had to tackle this thing head-on. It wasn’t just a dream; it was my body screaming at me. I decided to treat it like a bug in the code I was trying to fix. I started logging everything.
The Great Flop: Testing the BS Remedies
First thing I did? The stupid stuff everyone tells you to do. I wasted so much time and money on this nonsense. Let me break down the failures:
- I bought the fancy lavender oils. I smelled like a potpourri basket for a month. Did nothing. The priest still shouted.
- I cut out all caffeine after noon. Switched to decaf that tasted like dirt. I was tired all day and still terrified all night.
- I tried the “Guided Meditation” tracks. I forced myself to listen to some guy with a soft voice tell me to find my “inner happy place.” I couldn’t find it. I just got annoyed that the track was 20 minutes long.
- I bought blackout curtains. Spent a hundred bucks making my room a literal cave. Helped a little with the light, zero with the nightmares.
- I logged my diet meticulously. Cut out late-night snacks. Stopped having beer before bed. Still had the dream. It was exhausting.
I realized the fix wasn’t external. The dream wasn’t triggered by what I ate or what I smelled. It was the wiring inside my head. All that trying was just making me more stressed, and the nightmare was actually getting more frequent—sometimes twice a week. I had to dump the fluff and get real.
The Practice That Actually Worked (The Three Stops)
I scrapped the whole system and started over. I went totally basic, like trying to fix a leak with just a wrench and some tape. I mandated three non-negotiable stops in my evening routine. I tracked the dream’s disappearance, and I can tell you this is what shut the priest up.
1. The Information Stop (The Big Shove):
I literally shoved my phone and the TV remote into a box at 8:30 PM. No more doomscrolling. No more watching news clips about the world going to hell. I cut the visual stimulation like pulling a plug. I observed an immediate drop in the intensity of the pre-sleep anxiety.
2. The Mental Audit (The Brain Dump):
I forced myself to write down everything bothering me. Not in a journal, just a quick list. I used three columns: “Problem I can fix tomorrow,” “Problem I can’t fix,” and “Thing that went surprisingly well.” I wrote down the stressful thoughts, acknowledging them like waving goodbye, and then focusing on the good ones. This simple act made the racing thoughts slow down dramatically.
3. The Physical Reset (The Cave Temperature):
I started cooling the room way down. I mean, way down. I live in a warm climate, so I blasted the AC or, if the weather allowed, threw the window open for about twenty minutes before I got in bed. I crawled under the duvet shivering slightly. Turns out, a cooler body means deeper sleep. The dream hated the deep sleep. It couldn’t break through.
How I Even Got This Messy, Desperate Knowledge
You might be thinking, why go to all this trouble for just a dream? Why be such a weirdo and log sleep like it’s a science project?
Well, I knew exactly why I was having the Exorcism Dream. It wasn’t random stress. It happened right after I got completely screwed over by my old business partner. This guy, who I thought was like a brother, pulled the rug out—took all the clients, changed all the passwords, and I was left standing in the street with nothing but a final legal notice telling me to cease and desist from contacting any of our mutual contacts.
I felt spiritually violated. Like I was being purged from my own life, my own history. I fought the legal mess for months and the whole time, the shouting priest in my head was just yelling all the failure at me. It felt like the dream was the judge confirming I was out, excommunicated.
I hit rock bottom fast. Bills piled up. My savings evaporated. I walked into job interviews feeling fragile, and I bombed every single one. I was basically sleeping maybe three hours straight a night, and those three hours were a war. I was desperate to stop the feeling of being pinned down and powerless.
My ‘practice’ wasn’t about sleeping better; it was about taking back agency. By controlling the little things—the phone, the thoughts, the room temperature—I was proving to my subconscious that I still had control of something. I stopped waiting for the nightmare to happen. I started preparing for the good sleep.
Once I implemented these three simple stops, the dream flickered out. It didn’t stop all at once, but the intensity dropped, then the frequency, until it was just gone. I haven’t had the priest since I started logging the wins instead of the failures. If you’re struggling with a recurring anxiety dream, stop trying the fancy fixes. Just get control of the entry points to your brain before bed. It might just shut your personal demon up, too.
