The dreams, the dreams, aiee! (aha!)

I was rereading an article from Reader's Digest that I'd clipped I don't know how many years ago, about dreams and how different people tend to have different subjects and themes in their dreams.


People who have weak boundaries, who get walked all over, who can't stand up for themselves tend to have nightmares a lot.

Aha! That really explains a lot. This isn't just some theory I believe because I read it in RD, or whatever. It suddenly clicked yesterday after many years of thinking about the process of dreaming, and also thinking about people (like me!) who have gotten walked all over, again and again. We're women a lot of the time, we're generally socialized that way, ... and whatever. And sometimes we do learn to stand up for ourselves as best we can.

When I was kid, I had nightmares all of the time, and so did my younger sister. It was just awful trying to get to sleep. I used to tell Martha stories before she went to sleep because she was just as worried as I was. I did the same with my cousin Ellen, and when I babysat some years ago for Katie Harrier, I think I may have told her the same story, a really fluffy nothing about a little angel named [Martha, Ellen, Katie...] who lived on a little pink cloud...blah, blah blah. I figured it was better than nothing. I wonder what it would have been like if I could have told someone about my nightmares. I did sort of spontaneously come up with some of my own solutions, though maybe later in life.

Once I was having this nightmare about this skull that would show up everywhere I went, some pirates too, and suddenly I got the idea in my dream to just change channels, like you do with TV when you see something you don't want to see. Another time I was in a fight with a girl who used to give me endless crap at school, she was really verbally abusive and it pretty much tore me to pieces & inspired the other girls to be jerks to me too. In the dream we had a physical fight and she let me win, then said, okay, now it's your turn to let me win. Suddenly I just said, you know what, I didn't ask you to let me win, and I don't have to do anything like what you said. And that was that.

I think that was way after the facts of what happened at school, and after we moved to another state even. But I guess it kept me mostly from mentally wrestling with the problem.

But I had other problems with guys at school and I think that's what showed up in my dreams as a young adult. This one guy was physically and verbally abusive, and I couldn't tell anyone in my family about it. It scarred me awfully for years, and it divided my consciousness. I would just forget about it when school wasn't in session--I mean that's the best I could do. It's not that it wasn't a big big deal, it was just that that was the only remedy I was ever given in my whole life. So I had to bury the part of me that remembered it. Not a great solution.

I did complain to my mother as a young (and very depressed young adult) that I was constantly having nightmares ( I truly didn't know why, but I guess it was all kinds of abuse I'd had to just "forget about"). She said that I just had to change what I did during the day to change what happened in my head at night. That really wasn't specific enough if she even had any idea of what she was talking about, and it did as much harm as good.


Anyway, it's an ongoing labor to keep from having dreams where I am just not in control and the same bad things just keep happening or else life in the dreams is unbelievably muddy, the same boring 'shit' just happening over and over.

I'm not really complaining, since I'm an adult and rather more happily in the process of working stuff out,which is the best I can do.

But anyway, that's a big help seeing what the source of a lot of dream unhappiness is, and how it really does relate to waking life.