That's awesome! I'm glad it worked for you. It seems like it's been helpful for others too and I'm truly surprised to find that my little project is a recognized technique. At the time I thought I was just being cheap and lazy at writing, letting my dreams do all the heavy lifting.

For me, it also helped change how I felt about dreaming. I was actually glad to have bad nightmares, because it meant I'd have fertile material for a new story. I still have periods of nightmares but with one or two exceptions they're not like they were, and not as frequent.

OP, I don't know if this approach would make any difference, make it feel less trite and insulting, if you ever want to give it a try. But I never tried to change the things I dreamed about. I didn't try and give them a happy ending or take away the things that were awful. What I did do was put them in a fictional context and assign my perspective in the dream to a fictional character. Then I threw in aliens or government spies or whatever. Suddenly the narrator in my dreams was a protagonist fighting the forces of darkness, LOL.