Dreaming Through It

For the past few years, I’ve been dealing with an increasing number of dreams. For a lot of my life, I didn’t really dream much aside from a few repeats. I had one when I was younger about being swallowed by a blanket that showed up every time I got sick (our family called this specific blanket “the sick blanket” since, as little kids, we got bundled cosily into it when we weren’t feeling well), a weird warped-perspective dream about being a tiny dot that couldn’t move around my parents house every time I got sick after I was ten or eleven, and some weird tons-of-armies-fighting-a-giant-war dreams that were basically my imaginary play games given life and ridiculous scale by my sleeping mind. I’m sure I had other dreams from time to time, but I really didn’t have many and it was only in high school that I realized that most people dream much more frequently. These days, though I still don’t dream often, I now have about as many dreams a month as I used to have in a year. Generally speaking, they’re a much wider variety these days, having replaced the old “got stuck in high school as an adult somehow” anxiety dreams of my college years and early twenties with a much greater breadth of mental fiction. Unfortunately, this uptick in dreams coincides with me starting to finally process the trauma of my childhood and so most of my dreams since then have a dual attachment to my present and something I’m working through or have mostly worked through from my past. It’s kind of exhausting, to be frank, but I try to stay focused on it being a good sign that my mind is actively healing from the stuff I went through as a child.

Most of the time, the dreams don’t make a whole lot of sense outside the dream realm. Despite being a combination of my present circumstances and true things I felt about my childhood or experienced as a child, they tend to make about as much sense as most dreams. Just last night, I dreamt about sitting on my brother’s bed in the room we shared, talking to my mother about the contents of our closet (and the place I used to go and hide as a kid when I needed to get away from my brother) except that I was an adult and I was trying to make her understand how awful he’d treated me by pointing to things in the closet (that never took a material form I could recognize). The scale was wrong, it was the mother I remember from my childhood and not the one I last spoke to years ago, and it was all of the stuff I felt but could never say as a kid, endlessly repeated as my sleeping mind made the mental connection between my highly valued ability to endlessly bang my head on problems at work and my ability to silently endure anything I was subjected to as a child. That’s a helpful insight that will give me plenty to talk to my therapist about and has given me plenty to think about when I’m not banging my head on such a problem at work, but it left me feeling more tired when I woke up than I was when I went to sleep.

Thanks to the amount of therapy I’ve done and still do, and the amount of self-reflection that’s a part of my day-to-day life, figuring out the hidden meaning beneath my dreams is fairly easy. While I’ve always wanted to believe in dreams as some kind of external guidance sent to us that could be interpreted to provide answers for our future, the amount of work I’ve done to understand just how much of my dreams is a reflection of my present situation or recent past prevents me from believing that my dreams have anything to do with the future. The only part my dreams play in my future is by helping me to understand what’s going on in my mind, or what connections exist between my present and my past that I might not be seeing. There are lessons to be learned and insight to be gained, but not some kind of future to be understood. I’ve had too many weird dreams with bits of my present lifted into them whole-cloth and dreams with me being chased by violent masculine figures out of horror movies that somehow always sound like my brother to believe anything else.

I still appreciate that I’m having dreams, as much as they often suck to experience. Their appearance on the landscape of my mind was the first real sign I got that the work I’ve been doing in therapy for over a decade is actually paying off. Typically, at least as far as I’ve read and my therapist has learned, the science on dreams supports the idea that they’re our brains way of processing our recent past and everything that’s gone on in our lives. That’s one of the reasons that people tend to have flashbacks when they’re sleeping, as their minds endlessly revisit the trauma they can’t process in an attempt to handle it through the brain’s usual methods. Your brain gets stuck there, unable to explore new ideas or process your recent life, until you manage to unstick it via therapy or extremely good luck. I suspect that, by repressing everything as a kid, I prevented myself from doing a lot of dreaming that would have likely brought my traumas to the front of my mind back then. I didn’t even have the ability to really grasp metaphors terribly well, even if my early writing shows I was certainly capable of blundering into quite extensive metaphors, so it’s more apparent now that a lot of the dreams I did have as a child had to do with me exploring my feelings of powerlessness, injustice, and desire to escape, but I think I’d have had a lot more direct and much less metaphorical ones if I hadn’t been hiding so much from myself. All of which means I get to deal with them now, as an adult.

So every time I wake up, already mentally and emotionally exhausted from a horrible dream, I try to remind myself to look on the brightside. Sure, this day might be a wash and last night’s attempt at sleep might not have counted for much, but at least I’m healing. At least I’m gaining new insight into why I might be much more miserable in my present circumstances than I’d expect to be. At least I will have something new to talk about with my therapist. I wish I had better dreams like my flight-based or narratively interesting dreams, or even that I could go back to not having any dreams at all, but that’s not going to happen and I need to find a way to cope with the unpleasant mental landscape I find myself in these days. Thus the focused attempts in recent months to look on the brightside. Hopefully, I will run out of this trauma-adjacent stuff eventually and can go back to dreaming like most people do, no longer caught in the funhouse mirror version of my past that my brain is connecting (not always correctly) to my present. It sure would be nice to wake up thinking about some silly dream I had that I could actually share with people outside of conversations about my mental health journey or how awful my childhood was.

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