A Different Kind of Dreaming

They say that people dream often and often don’t remember them. I don’t think that I was doing a lot of deep sleep or dreaming for a long time. It was hugely influenced by my PTSD, my high pain levels and health issues, and noise levels where I have lived for many years. I am sleeping better now than I have for a long time, since having my gall bladder removal surgery and dreaming more, which is a tremendously good sign that my body is healthier and healing more.

About a year ago or so I started dreaming about my family. I’ve always dreamed about family members. But it used to be different.

I used to dream of them and me, but I was a different person and they were different people. In the dreams I would always have lucid thoughts, I would realize that so and so in the dream was really my mother in real life and that it was a dream. I would be a different person, but I always realized that it was me in the dream.

I don’t like it when I dream about my mother, even though in the dreams she is usually someone else. I wake up feeling creeped out and disgusted and dirty. I suppose most people would feel that way, if they dreamed about their primary sexual abuser. I try not to think about her after I wake up.

In the last year I’ve started to dream of family members and they are themselves in the dreams instead of being someone else. I believe this is a sign that I am associating with my life more than I am dissociating from my life, and in some ways it is comforting and a sign of healing and in others ways it is difficult and disconcerting just because it is new and something that I never done in my dream life before, at least not that I have remembered.

I sometimes dream of someone who died decades ago and sometimes of people who are alive now. I still seem to be aware that it is a dream, though I don’t seem to have to have as much inner dialogue going on in the dreams.

Recently I had a bizarre dream that seemed to have no inner monologue, showing me that I was lucid dreaming. I was dreaming of my aunt and my cousin, her daughter. I was an adult, my aunt was an adult, and older than me, but her daughter was still a child in the dream. This was weird because she is only three years younger than me in real life and has three adult children herself now. Weird and weird to wake up and realize that I wasn’t talking to myself during the dream. It was disconcerting to wake up while dreaming and not having worked on understanding the dynamics of the dream already. It seems abnormal to me.

I suppose that one dream doesn’t mean that I will always dream like that, not talking to myself during the dream. I might do both kind of dreaming in the future.

I wouldn’t be upset if I didn’t dream of my family, but one way or another, as themselves or as a fictional character in my dreams, I suppose that my mind needs to work out issues and they are definitely issues in my life, even when I don’t see or associate with some of them.