While I sleep, the movies my mind plays evoke every emotion I've ever known. When I'm lucky, my subconscious keeps me to 3 sentiments - but sometimes, in one dream, or over a series of nights, I could easily experience everything I've ever felt in my lifetime.
As a child, I remember recurring nightmares about dogs chasing me through the dark woods.
Adulthood did not stop the bad dreams, only the theme changed - I often dreamt of my teeth falling out.
Over the last several years I've settled into yet another series that I can expect regularly to wake me in the night with my heart racing... being lost. Lost at school. Everyone knows me, likes me and even wishes me luck on my swim meet (in reality I never swam) and I am wandering around franticly looking for my locker, trying to remember the lock combo and my class schedule and desperately grabbing everyone - anyone - who will believe my story that I don't belong there. As they dismiss me the panic inside grows to such an intollerable level I wake gasping for breath and feeling the need to bolt from my bed to safety - but where is that exactly? I don't know. I have to talk myself down - to stay where I am - becuase there isn't anywhere safer.
Nobody ever believes me in my dreams - I wonder why.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out what all these dreams mean at a Freudian level. I just wonder why they continue for so long. Weeks, months, years. And what happens each time the theme changes? I assume it's that something in my life changes - something or someone new? A shift in my moral or ethical value system?
I think the changes stem from my self-worth - how I feel about myself in that time of my life - my own reality of me. In the past 8 months, I've learned a lot about a lot. Mostly about my family, my career, my talents - and shortfalls, my hopes and plans for the future, my desires and my past. Very recently I've done some hard work on that last part - my past. Interesting, but very hard work. Now I'm curious to see how the new reality in which I view myself, and everyone else, will affect my dreams.
If the nightmares become bearable or less frequent - does that mean my work was worth it?
And what if they don't? What does that mean?