Dear Jessica Brennan,
I don’t sleep much, but when I do, I dream a lot. This means that even when I’m asleep, I don’t sleep much. I love to dream.
I used to have dreams that involved driving but not being able to see, or being unable to quite stop the car no matter how I pressed the brake. I haven’t had that dream in ages. I also used to have embarrassing dreams of standing at the bus stop in just my slip, or going to work and forgetting my skirt. These dreams too seem to have vanished. There were points in my life where I allowed my job to bother me so much that I would dream about working all night. It was like I was at work, then I would get up and go to work. This too has ended. Who wants to live like that?
My dreams are vivid, and rarely do I forget them. For a long time I kept a dream journal and I still like to go back and read the notes I made in great detail. Maybe I will start that again. A lot of my dreams seem to involve nature, especially water and travel of one kind or another. At one point I taught myself to lucid dream so I could walk around the dream and have a good look, but then I felt like I wasn’t sleeping at all, so I untrained myself.
When I was a child I used to have very bad dreams about scary things. I still remember a dream about a lion. I could see it on my bedroom wall and I was inconsolable. It was really there as far as I was concerned. I could see it so clearly. I know now that dreaming about a lion is an invitation to examine what in your life is causing tension and despair. I was about 3 if I’m correct, the lion was causing my tension and despair. Now if I have a bad dream and wake up partway through, I try to go back and finish the dream with a happy resolution. I have a little fear that the unresolved scary incident, still lives in another dimension and must be reconciled so it doesn’t find me down the road.
I have had a few recurring dreams and the most re-visited one involves an obstacle course of swimming, climbing, shimmying and climbing some more through lakes, rocky cliffs and narrow passes. I have had this dream so often that I now know the terrain well enough to not fear the dangers of the steep paths and treacherous tors, anymore. At first I was afraid but now, when I find myself in this dream, I see it as an old friend. I am comforted to swing across the high expanse on a rope. I have no fear at all and I recognize it as a metaphor for my waking hours. Do it enough, and the fear will disappear.
I believe that we haven’t even scratched the surface of why we dream, what dreams mean or how to use them to direct us while we are awake. We write songs about them, use the word dream to describe our hopes for the future, and we have a fascination with why we have them at all.
Enter sandman.
Love Mum xo
