Disturbing
dreams aren’t quite nightmares. They
may cause you to wonder what exactly your
sub-conscious is trying to tell you.
First, the dreams could be unconscious advice.
Maybe in some way you are betraying yourself,
forgetting something, or not fulfilling
a potential. For example, persons on the
edge of a midlife career change may have
dreams about being in school and searching
for a missing classroom, or they may find
themselves in a class about to take a final
exam while realizing that they completely
forgot to attend the class all year. Thus
the feeling of panic in the dream points
to the real feeling of panic in their current
life about the failure of their present
career.
Second, the dreams could be an admonition,
based in guilt. Imagine, for example, that
you are embezzling the bank for which you
work. Then you start having dreams about
burglars breaking into your home.
Well, the dreams are simply a depiction
of something happening to you that is similar
to the hurt or moral injury you are inflicting
on someone else. This same dynamic often
occurs in children’s nightmares: in
waking life, children often experience angry
feelings toward their parents and yet lack
the cognitive capacity to express these
feelings openly; so, in unconscious guilt,
the anger becomes turned against themselves
as threatening nightmare images.
Third, the dreams could be hints of a repressed
trauma. As I say above, nightmares often
accompany the emotional pain of a traumatic
event experienced in adulthood. But if a
trauma in childhood is repressed, dreams
reflecting the emotional intensity of the
trauma can persist throughout life—as
a repetition compulsion—until the
trauma is eventually brought to conscious
awareness and healed.
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