I wasn’t able to attend the last book study group in person, and I’m just listening to the recording now. Early on, Andrew talks about the recommendation to watch horror movies as a way to prepare for- and gain mindfulness/awareness/composure around- the fear we will experience in the bardo.
This was exciting to hear as I had actually started doing this a while back. I have been plagued by nightmares for many years, I’m very jumpy and startle prone, and I hate horror movies/TV. But for some reason I started watching a horror TV show and using it as a meditation. As fear came up, I reminded myself again and again “this is a dream. This is a dream” and reinforced the sense of distance between the images and my emotional response. I also brought awareness to the room around me (ie. I am sitting on a couch in a room, breathing… ) rather than being completely sucked into the world of the screen.
Within days of starting this exercise, I had my first lucid dream (after about 6 months of working on it). Wow.
That said, once I got bored of that show after a few seasons, I stopped watching, and haven’t found a sufficiently scary substitute. Maybe it eased my fear enough that now I’d need something even scarier!
Very interested to hear if others have played around with this technique and what your experience was!