Nightmare

I had a dream last night that seemed hugely important at the time, and now I can't quite remember why. I was living with my mother and two small children in a huge Victorian house that caught on fire. My mother kept trying to get the kids out of the way, and I thought she was trying to protect them, but then I realized they were hindering her efforts to save the house, and that was why she wanted them out of the way.

I thought this was a huge revelation at the time, but now I'm not so sure.

For me, often dreams will feel really important upon waking. And then I become disconnected from it and that importance wanes. So, I've taken to writing about them as soon as I wake up. I find that this is when I can recall the most details and often the details are very telling. A dream like the one you had is quite telling. But you have to figure out what it means for you. I'm glad you remembered it.

Hi Paul,

I find the metaphor of planning a children's party when the monsters are going to turn up is fascinating. I wouldn't want to make any assumptions about what it means, but it raises questions about our level of awareness. I once had a therapist tell me that one of her clients was abused for months on end because she was targeted as she returned to the same place in the playground each day. She hoped that each day it would be different, but it wasn't. She didn't know that she had choices of going to another area of the playground. It was like she was stuck in a loop. She wasn't a dissociative, so didn't have total amnesia about the abuse. She just hoped that it wouldn't happen the next time she sat there. I think we sometimes forget that as children, our resources for coping and adapting are fairly limited.

I had a recurring nightmare about a lecture theatre full of people being machine gunned down. Some tried to escape and were hindered by a wire mesh fence with a gate that was held closed by a heavy chain. No one heard us screaming to un-loop the chain as we couldn't make a sound. They thought it was padlocked, but it wasn't. We ended up walking in front of the machine gun. Considering we are against guns and violence, these sorts of dreams always terrify us. We know that the dreams are tied to our need to be perfect, trying to help (others and ourselves) and not having a voice.

I know others who use dreaming in a healing way. We rarely remember dreams and have tried writing them down after waking to see if that helps. I think we're also being protected from the dreams. I know there have been other dreams where a group of girls have been paraded in front of businessman as objects to be offered up for pleasure by their mothers, so I know the dreams can be a release of memories and a trigger as well.

Take care...

Oh, I love dream interpretations, it is one of my favorite things!

I don't remember my nightmares/dreams anymore, but I know they are horrible. I wake up with a scream on my lips and usually drench my sheets nightly. It is terrible, and I know I will eventually remember again once I'm ready to accept my past and move past the denial stage I am in...

Anyway, when I did remember my dreams I found that they usually were trying to warn me of some way I was currently/going to sabotage myself or how to solve a current issue or problem. I could only figure this out by careful analysis and a handy dream encyclopedia too.

When I read "David's" comment I thought that his dream meant that he felt his mother does not value human life...that objects/things (the house) are more important.

Dreams are never sick, it is all a matter of your brain interpreting data. I happen to like Steven King and twisted things though, so you won't scare me!

If you don't mind, and if you are interested, I really wanted to interpret this dream. My curiosity is a big part, but here goes (I am using my book "Element Encyclopedia of 20,000 Dreams" for guidance):

Daughter/wife - feminine side/relationship between father and wife/need for female attention/sexual or emotional

I think dreaming of your daughters AND your wife in the same dream means you are worried about your relationship with them and/or are having trouble connecting to their feminine needs; or you feel they need something from you that you are not providing (hence trying to protect them...). It could also mean you have trouble connecting to your own feminine needs or side, which needs attention for some reason right now

Hospital - healing/side or part of yourself needing care or attention/wanting to be relieved of burdens. A side of you needing care.

In this dream though I think the hospital might mean you are afraid of putting your care into someone else's hands...because there was more of a horror aspect to it or that you think a part of you is diseased?

Underground - symbol of journey into subconscious/discovery of unknown parts.

Tunnels - indicates need to explore your unconscious/birth canal or birth process/Blocked tunnel (monsters) means past fear is blocking your progress

Water - almost always indicates emotions

Swimming - exploring emotions (ha, ha, ha, - "common for people going through therapy/counseling" - direct quote)

Scuba diving - finding repressed parts of yourself (feminine, because with wife most likely) which feels "unsafe" or is very conflicting for you/desire to throw yourself into a relationship (that may be troubled since it was again "unsafe")

Swimming pool - constrained emotions

Monster (questions) - why is it chasing you? what does it look like? what does it want? book suggests trying to confront it and ask questions/identify if character/feeling if dream is unclear or reoccurring

Monster (representational) - representation of untamed impulses that fill you with disgust and loathing

Horror/Panic in dream - subconscious trying to tell you about something you are horrified of/a phobia you should be aware of/Connected with monsters - must confront what is causing horror/panic or it will 'consume' you

Throwing party - desire to show affection to those close (or that were invited)

I find dreams are very rarely literal. It is also usually better if you use the dictionary yourself, because certain parts will stand out specifically for you, but this is just my opinion of it all. I hope it helps and that some parts strike true for whatever you are currently going through in 3-D life. I do see a lot of reoccurring themes, which I find always means something to me...usually driving some point home.

I can relate to this very much. My dreams tell me a lot about myself and generally what I am worrying about but refuse to acknowledge in real time. I have a lot of dreams about attachment in general and my fears of emotional connectedness. Abandonment is also a big theme.

I've been locked in some kind of nightmare cycle lately. Every night they seem to get worse and worse. Last night the ocean (water again, a frequent theme in my dreams too) washed away all my belongings and as I walked away from the shoreline, quite stunned and in shock, the side of my head started to hurt quite a lot. I put my hand to my head, and underneath my hair I felt a huge gouge, quite deep! Suddenly I was in front of a mirror staring at a gigantic hole in my scalp with a green center of infection oozing out.

My therapy has become very intense now, we are digging into the center, finding the core that was so hurt, so devastated, so completely isolated and alone in with pain, over and over and over again, day after week after year after decade.

I'm sure these dreams are a result of the therapy but right now I can't figure out the meanings as I am too busy trying to figure out ways to either stay awake all night (gallons and gallons of black tea?) or drug myself into a realm of dreamless sleep (bottles and bottles of benzodiazepines?)

I am grateful for this blog and community that you have formed here Paul. It's so good to have an intelligent group of others who are on the same journey of exploring their mind--the last group I was in was so busy playing games with each other's littles and refining littlespeak to a high art, there was no time or interest left for much else.

Thank you!

I'm always mildly cautious about dream interpretation. I've seen some people who take it to the extreme and take them very literally. Sometimes it's obvious that there is a message within a dream, but as symbolism is different across cultures the same object won't necessarily mean the same thing. I agree that you can look for themes, sometimes the interpretation of symbolism worries me.

I learned to fear dreams fairly early on in life. I constantly had very vivid dreams of future events. Unfortunately the dreams didn't tell me the winning lottery numbers; but instead I would wake knowing that in one week my grandmother was going to die or my sister was going to be attacked. As a 7 year old, what are you meant to do with that information?

Hello "jahda" -

I read your comment, and your dream, and you said you didn't know what the dream was about. It seems like in the paragraph after the dream's description you said what the dream is about.

That you are getting at the center of your therapy issues (represented by whole in head, that is infected because how long it has been hurt and over and over, so it was left to fester). And like I said to Paul, water is almost always about wading through emotions. Losing all of your possessions could mean that you feel emotionally stripped, since they were lost in the ocean. That you feel vulnerable emotionally...

Ocean - unconscious emotion; therapy
Losing belongings - something in waking life is draining you or you feel something valuable of yourself might be lost (maybe emotionally); maybe therapy is draining because it is really hard right now or you are afraid of losing part of yourself because of therapy
Pain - fear of being hurt in real life/
Head - wisdom, intellect & logic/decision making
Blood - loss of strength or need for emotional nourishment
Wound - hurt feeling/emotions
Bacteria/Infection - suggests hidden attack on your well-being/symbolic of ideas that cause you irritability or anxiety

I could be wrong, but wanted to point it out in case it meant anything to you. I love doing dream analysis! I wish I remembered mine right now...

-MM

I agree, it should only be taken literally if it FEELS like it should be to you personally. I just happen to like it because I find it usually fits for me, almost exactly - symbolism I mean. So it is like free therapy...

I find it uncanny that you mention having premonition dreams, as I used to as well. Once I had a dream a friend was going to commit suicide on the train tracks near my house, and she did the next day. I had to walk by her bloody car on the way home, which was still there...

As a child with no one to talk to, (as is the case with many who are being abused) to tell us it would be alright, to comfort us, or to help us make sense of things. So as a child we were as helpless with our dream information as we were about the rest of our life at that time, but not now. That is probably why now I try to make sense of my dreams and use them as a tool, to maybe help myself and others.

I hope that you too will learn to like dreaming again and not fear it. It can be a beautiful insight into how your unique mind works. Or it can just be good entertainment!

Wow, thank you all for your very thoughtful comments. It's interesting that I never really think through what these dreams/nightmares mean as far as all the details go. But I do take home a general message. This one was about "journey", "fears", and "protection" for me. I rather like all your interpretations, MM. Jahda, I'll post something tomorrow about the comment you made concerning what this blog means. So, I thank you in advance for what you've said. To be honest, I haven't had dreams like this in a while, like years. They seem to be related to the work I'm doing inside and the increased awareness I have of what's going on in me.

I wanted to comment on what Jahda said concerning the extremes associated with sleep. I'll write about this soon and hopefully we can discuss this. This is a huge problem that I'm sure many of us share.

My Monster -- Ah, well ... I don't think that's what the dream is about at all. I rarely think that people in dreams actually represent themselves; they're more likely, I think, to be aspects of the dreamer.

And so my own interpretation of this dream is that I am preserving the outward functional structure of my life at the expense of acknowledging my child-part needs; it's very easy for me to pretend I am keeping them safe, but the actual truth is that those demands and fears are inconvenient and I would rather not deal with them. The figure in my dream was my mother rather than me because that is my unconscious mind's shorthand for behavior that chooses outward stability over a child's needs.

I had a most unsettling dream tonight and just woke up from it at 3:15AM. I remember it felt unsettling while it was happening. I assume that most of my dreams are about internal parts. Here goes. 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.

David, I don't quite know what the difference is when you write: "I rarely think that people in dreams actually represent themselves; they're more likely, I think, to be aspects of the dreamer." Can you elaborate?

One of the things I thought of when I read the dream is that it twists and turns and changes a lot. When my dreams do that I feel more exhausted when I wake than before I went to bed.

Austin

I am certain many dreams have twists and turns as our unconscious mind travels in sleep. But I am really beginning to think that it's our awareness that's important. As I wrote in the next post, I could easily have gone to sleep and not remembered much. I think the openness is important in how much actually gets retained and processed.

Another discussion is taking place at Scattered Pieces which refers to this one. I posted that I now understand what David was saying in his question above, which is that our subconscious is always trying to show us aspects of ourselves even though it appears at first glance the dreams are about other people. For those who have a DID-type internal experience, these dreams can perhaps be more complicated. And also that this subconscious projection in some way mirrors the way we created "alters" (I hate that word, but I'll go with it for now) in our internal system. In other words, there's a fine line between what happens in our sleep and what happens in the real world. Those two worlds can interact.

Hi, Paul --

I mean that I think people in dreams are rarely who they are in real life, if you dream about people whom you know in real life. It would, for example, be easy enough to accept the surface-simplistic explanation of my dream that MM suggested, but it would also be incorrect. That interpretation of the dream relies on the assumption that the mother in my dream is actually my mother, whereas I think that's not likely to be the case.

It is highly unusual for me to dream about people whom I actually know, so in my case, when I do, I know that my brain is trying harder than usual to present the information in a way I can "tolerate." For example, by displacing this lack of caretaking onto my mother, the image was presented in a way that perhaps I could think about. My own real-world literal presentation is such that in the same situation, I would leave the house to burn and take the children as far away as I could, if we were assuming that this was a real fire. So my brain wouldn't get very far with a message showing me behaving inappropriately toward children during a house fire; it knows me by now, and knows I'd wake up, say "Well, that was ridiculous" and not give another thought to it.

And so my unconscious, which was trying to tell me something about my inner life, used a literal figure whom I would "accept" in this situation -- my mother. That did get my attention, because the way she behaved in the dream was congruent with her real life behavior to some extent, though it was a literalized version of it ... she would never have found a child in real physical danger to be an inconvenience, but she did set aside my needs in order to preserve the facade of her marriage, which provided her with security (which is one of the things that large traditional house represents). However, since I know that I rarely dream about people I know, and that when I do, they are not "themselves" in my dream, the dream prompted me to think further about what was really going on, and what my unconscious was trying to tell me.

"In other words, there's a fine line between what happens in our sleep and what happens in the real world. Those two worlds can interact."

I have a lot of DID related dreams. I have dreams where there are layers upon layers of roof tops or where there's a tiny entrance I somehow make it through to reach an expanded area.

Most of the time I realize the people in the dream are either all me or I somehow relate to their experiences. This is why I have superstars show up in my dreams. LOL They seem so out of place but really they aren't. I haven't been able to remember many of my dreams lately which is very odd for me. I usually remember them in strict, horrifying detail but as of late I don't remember them at all. I still feel sick to my stomach when I wake but there's nothing to process because the dream is gone. I admit, I don't try that hard to recall it.

I like to read dreams of others too.

Austin