Remembering Dreams
I've talked before about dreams and nightmares (see "Dreams" category), including in the last post. I wanted to bring up a connection I made just tonight.
First, I repost from the comments of the prior post the broad brush of my dream tonight:
I was living in a huge labyrinth of a house. It was all one level. At first, I was running the house with someone else and there were lots of kids. The house had a control center in it. In order to get through the night, I had to go into a special room and shut down the control center for 12 hours. Somehow, this was supposed to take care of everyone in the house. There was a huge sense of responsibility and of the stakes being high, almost like life or death. But, then like many of my dreams, there was a second part which was different from the first. The second part was a larger house. This time I was living with about a couple dozen other men. I was low man on the totem poll, I know that. There was a movie being made and I was assigned to do something technical with my cell phone in one scene (write a text message to 4 of the other men). In order to do that I had to get the phone numbers from the other men. This was hard because everyone was talking. I noticed that most of the men were shabbily dressed, some were very dirty and looked like they were street people. As the paper was being passed around, I woke up.
As I've said before, I don't spend much time interpreting every detail of my dream, searching for hidden meanings. It's much easier now to get the take home message from them because they all seem to clear.
I mostly don't remember much at all about my dreams or nightmares when I wake. I could have easily turned over and went back to sleep and this morning I would probably have had only a sense that I dreamed but would not have known much more than that. But I find that when I sit up for a while and breathe a little, the memory of the dreams surface. It's not exactly effort. I cannot really think myself into remembering. It's more of an internal acceptance and listening that allows it to happen.
I suddenly realized that the manner in which I remember my dreams upon waking is almost identical to how I remember therapy upon leaving. This was shocking to me. This tells me that in therapy, I clearly am often in some other state of consciousness.
But it also tells me that I have the ability to communicate inside. This is comforting.
In tomorrow's post, I'll write about disordered sleep and sleep hygiene.
I have realized this, also. If I go home after therapy and sit quietly and process my session, I will remember more than when I come home and become engaged in something else.
Uncanny, how this fits in with dreams, too.