One of the positive things the pandemic brought about was my sister’s sobriety. During the height of the second Covid wave, she moved to Florida to enter a PHP facility, where she was able to finally learn about the disease that she had constantly suffered from. Emerging from nearly a decade-long battle with addiction, she slowly became her old self again and was ready to reconnect with me.
We spoke a lot about our childhood memories, and one of the recurring topics became our dreams. From being chased down the road by a murderer to getting tickled by talking skeletons, we often shared the same bizarre experience growing up. Nightmares, in particular, seemed to be our specialty, no doubt a consequence of the many horror movies we were permitted to watch from a very young age.
She calls me about once a week to give me the details of her bizarre dreams. From flinging a 15 lb. bag of rice at an assailant to encountering dark entities trying to pull her back into her addiction, it’s obvious she’s trying to cope with the stress of her emotions again. Meanwhile, my own nightmares never diminished over the years. If anything, the intensity and vividness only increased.
We try to make sense of them using an old Dream Dictionary I’ve had since high school. Oftentimes, it forces us to reflect upon the complex emotions we are experiencing in waking life. One dream she had involved a cat, which we later discovered our consciousness substitutes for an infant or child. Now, is this process scientifically accurate? No, but I don’t consider something as complex as our unconscious mind a good fit for that type of measurement and the explanation fit at the time.
The bigger question was, why do we have so many nightmares, to begin with? Sickness or stress may play a part, but are we not the architects of our unconscious thoughts? I could go on forever trying to psychoanalyze nightmares, but I want to focus on the result of taking an active role in them. Jung thought we were the sole authors of our dreams, that we could effectively alter our destiny in the physical realm if we wrote a better story while we slept. This is what interests me the most. If I can gain from the nightly terrors I experience by confronting them, then why not at least try?
In a recent dream, I was at the mall–a common place for people to go during their dreams– helping a friend pick out some jewelry when the police rushed past us, taking down an active shooter one storefront over. Being far enough from the danger, my friend stayed put, but I decided to flee. Instead of running away like a normal person, I bounded over the railing, but I woke up before I hit the ground.
What would have happened if I stayed behind, like my friend? If I had conjured up this scenario all by myself, why couldn’t I find a better way out of it? Why did I even put myself in that position in the first place? If we are the masters of our own thoughts, then we should hold the key to undoing them.
When we enter our dreams, we encounter the story and characters of our own flesh and blood. We are forced to confront ourselves and the shadow that dwells within us. If we don’t face these villains while we sleep, what happens to them when we wake up? Do they revel in victory, waiting for us to return the next night?
In two different dreams I had during the same week, I encountered a Succubus who resembled the monster Medusa. The prevalence of such a figure has been around for thousands of years, but why was she coming to me now? The way I saw her, she was slimy and gross, like the veil of lust had been removed, showing her for what she truly was. It was the thought I had immediately after waking, allowing me to bypass her influence while I dreamt the next few nights. Once I had that idea, it was like a blueprint had been laid, allowing me to overcome her power.
It is freeing, in a way, to believe you can influence the worlds you enter while you sleep. People like me, who can lucid dream, know that it can be done. Now, that’s not to say I believe we should all try to suppress our nightmares. In fact, I think it’s the opposite. Nightmares can be a primer for the trauma we deal with while we are awake. There are no heros in a utopian world. We just have to figure out the best ways of reflecting on the horrors. It is like watching a movie, and rooting for the good guy, even if you don’t have control of the outcome. Your mind is still working out the type of person you would be in that situation.
It helps if you have a friend around to vent about the giant spiders trying to bite you or the roller coaster that has come off its tracks. Sensitive people would benefit from coming to terms with these characters of their own making. Some of us just have to work it out more than others.
Kali Butcher 