I have always been a dreamer, both during the day and at night. Most of my REM dreams have been things that are either the usual fluff (the seemingly random consequence of brain repair) or the symbolic chilling ones that seem to last well into the following day. I’d just assume the brain was offering up some experience that was needed to reorganize itself to accommodate something that it experienced recently. “I wonder why the hell I needed to have that experience” was often enough for me to just let go of thinking about it and just get on with the day as best I can.
But sometimes when I’m going through some sort of ego death and fundamental restructuring of identity, the dreams become battles against something that really doesn’t want to let go.
I am in one of those periods now and fortunately I have the self-awareness to know what is happening soon after I wake-up in a cold sweat thinking “what the F was that?”
Some of the dreams over the few last weeks have been particularly disturbing. Throughout most of them, I keep thinking “this isn’t on me, these people are responsible for their own actions.” Many are loaded with symbolism and others are simply the raw sensory information being perceived for the literal experience it was meant to be.
There are reoccurring ones about my Canadian schools. One batch has me running through my first Canadian grade school. I’m older in this dream, I think my current age and I’m trying to help some of the new Canadian children feel at place there. The pace is frantic and I don’t know if I’m helping. The next school dream is of my Junior high school, were I am circling a route inside it, frantically trying to get somewhere but I’m just running and running, round and round. Then there is the high school one. In this I’m not a part of the school or the people. I’m effectively isolated.
Most recently the dreams have been more about being with a smaller group of people – me and two or three other people – vs. the building of complete isolation that I was experiencing with the school dreams. We start off as a large group, with all but a few of them leaving at the end. The remain ones are unique in that we possess something that the rest didn’t. It’s tough to say what exactly it is, but the rest are returning to their old life while we remain separate and distinct.
I have had a couple of dreams about golf courses. These are significant because I don’t dream about golf and only spend time near a course the summer before and after Natalie died. They are less intense and less frequent – they haven’t happened in consecutive evening and I’m able to engage the people more effectively.
These dream reveal two things. The first is an intense and deeply seeded sense that I don’t belong – stemming from moving from Ireland when I was 9. The second is a deeply seeded sense that I am not worthy of love stemming from the fact that Natalie broke-up with me a couple of months before her life ended.
I am waiting for the final lesson / piece of information and this is the one that actually frightens me as it will have something to do with an earlier period of my life before I moved to Canada. My apprehension about it stems from the fact that EVERYTHING has gone into my brain and shaped me in some way but most of it is beyond my conscious ability to recall after almost 35 years.