Doom and gloom do not become me. I do not wear them well. Most of the time I like to dress in sunshine and flowers and hear laughter and music. The glass is definitely half-full in my world.
Except when I sleep.
Numerous times in this journal I have mentioned that my sleep is plagued by disturbing dreams. Every single nite. Once, erroneously, I recall writing in here that these "bad" dreams had been occurring each nite for the past two years. I meant to go back and change it to the correct number. Which is four. Four years of nitely (and even daytime should I happen to take a nap) doom, gloom, sadness, pain, confusion. It takes a toll. Why do I have to remember them? Why can't I just wake to nothingness? No leftover melancholy or tears to haunt me.
It is no coincidence, I am certain, that bleak dreams replaced any good ones right after my father passed away. I have yet to make the connection as to why. I have zero regrets about my relationship with him. He was the quintessential loving father, and I was the loving daughter. No doubts there. Maybe his death shocked my brain and rattled out all of the darkness that over the years had stealthily crept in via the newspapers and television news and ugly people with ugly mouths and vile actions.
Anyway, Thursday was a difficult day. A hard day. One I despised. From the moment I awoke to the moment I fell asleep, I felt no happiness. I had seen and felt someone else's hurt. Agonizing hurt. The wounding of a soul. I looked forward to sleep. I cannot think while I am asleep, I recall saying to myself. And I immediately fell into a hard, deep sleep. And I dreamt. Of what? Let me share...
There was a cemetery. Vines were everywhere. Tangling around our feet. Climbing on top of headstones. My father was being buried. My entire family and our friends were gathered around while he was being lowered into the ground. Yet he was not the only person being buried at that time. In nearby places were little graves. New ones with the dirt still piled and dying flowers resting atop the tiny rectangles of children's graves. There were some burial services going on while Daddy's was. All of them were little children who had died. Amidst my own grief, I saw the stark faces of extraordinary pain on the mourners for all of those dead children. Families clutching one another, sobbing. Wails permeating the stillness. It was a glimpse into the epitome of pure, raw pain.
Then I woke. Horrified. Sick inside. As I tend to do, I sat and revisited the specifics of the dream, pulling together some sense of it. I have had death dreams previously, and none of them have ever foretold of someone I know dying. I generally dismiss that as a cause for such dreams. But this one shook me wicked hard. And then it all came together. I know what it meant.
Daddy being in it represented how much I miss him. Every day. And those tiny coffins and burial spots of little children? They represented the little deaths I am currently experiencing in my life. The death of hopes, wants, needs, relationships, and the future. Oh, yes. Little deaths. Each one marking my heart with a knife. Scarring it.
Maybe I have grown accustomed to having such extremely tormenting dreams, because while this one bothered me, analyzing it helped me get past its effects a tad sooner than I otherwise would. It made much sense in the light of day. More importantly, it fit all too well with the angst that had comprised my Thursday. I saw a little death that day. I felt it. And that nite my dream ran with it.
The good is that there will be new hopes and desires to replace those which have withered and died. Their time will come. When it is the right time.
"I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?" ~John Lennon
5 comments:
One of my great therapy insights is that my dreams are never exactly representational, but symbolic.
We have always found dreams to be a release of the poison that builds up in the basement of the mind, that place where detritus comes to rest and furtive creatures lurk that shun the light. If not for that release, who knows what realities we might inhabit?
Hugs,
Bonnie and Walt
I wish I could take these dreams away. I hate anything that can squash joy.
BIG HUGS
love and prayers coming your way sweets! SWEET DREAMS to YOU!
........In my experience, depending on the individual`s state of mind and psychological makeup, there are three levels of interpretation that can be analyzed from some but not all dreams. The level of interpretation is directly related to the depth that the dream may reach before the individual`s anxiety tolerance forces wakefulness.
A person`s ability to tolerate anxiety while dreaming seems somewhat fluid, depending on their mental state while awake. A person feeling relatively stress-free, with a good mental outlook, will be more open to experience deeper levels of the dream experience. It is also my belief that individuals who have been open to the creative process are more amenable to experience their dreams at the deepest level.
The first level of a dream generally is referenced to the individual`s daily life. The happenings of the previous days[s] present themselves to the dreamer in fairly undisguised form, easily open to free association.
However, if the dreamer remains sleeping, his/her personal unresolved conflicts become part of the dream pattern. It is at this level that many of us experience repetitive dreams as the ego continually tries to remove the cathected [bound] libidinal energy from earlier unresolved conflicts in our life. Dream interpretation through free association is especially valuable here as these unresolved conflicts and their cathected energy constitute much of our defensive posture. It is the unresoved, anxiety arousing earlier experiences that define our personality, that posture that allows others to define us and helps narrow our exposure to similar experiences. In dreaming, we are generally awakened at this point; the cathected energy often appears as anxiety, causing nightmares and/or restlessness.
Finally, and rarely, there is a level of dreaming that is archtypical, that is part of all of us, the stuff of thousands of years of animal experience. Only the most courageous and those most open to the creative experience will generally see more than a glimpse of these primitive id strivings before nightmares drive us to wakefulness. These are the dreams of the human unsocialized, dreams that reveal our strivings toward immortality. Dreams that define us as human and condemn us to death and finiteness.......
V
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