Dreams

My recent dreams are all about work.  I'm coming towards the end of my six month probation period as a bus driver.  I keep having dreams that I'm turning up to work late which is annoying as in reality I get into work 30 minutes early to ease any anxiety of even getting close to being late.  But when you are deep in a dream and cannot snap out of it, it's so frustrating and upsetting, but also such a relief when I wake up.

Maybe it's because I have my six month review approaching and my mind is going into over drive I don't know? I just want to get past this stage with a flying flag saying well done

I'm very big on dreams, and have been for a while, the degree of vividness and intensity changes, and sometimes there are lead-offs into consciousness where I continue seeing very vivid images in my mind even when I'm very conscious and awake. The vivid conscious images thing frightened me a lot for a while, until I realised they were fine, and not an indication of incipient mental breakdown, but a normal highly psychologically active, part of my psychological cycle of facing things, and absorbing and accepting them, at different levels of my being, from facing something as a feeling, thought or an insight, to really absorbing the full emotional force of something I have to face in my life. So now I basically just let them flow in me, and impact me in whatever way the experience wants to.

I write my dreams down very often. Not to look for meaning, but to crystallise the emotion of the dream, because it's through grasping and working with the emotion that I get to sit on the cusp of who I am becoming if I can face the feelings effectively. It's not just a matter of trying to accept the emotions, although for a really panic-filled dream the first thing is just breathing, breathing, breathing, and then getting hold of myself, and then pulling myself together enough to write the stuff down in order to really process it properly. I also find my mind free associates while I am writing the dream so I make associations between my waking life and what was going on during the dream, and that helps hugely to make connections between my waking mind and my unconscious mind. 

If I have had a frightening dream or something vaguely disturbing that leaves me in a fog, it can be terrifying to relive it again by writing it down, but I tell myself that nothing can hurt me from writing things down - novelists can write some terrible things but often lead very quiet, calm and uneventful lives. Then once I have written it down, the act of writing has helped me to construct that bridge between my conscious and unconscious life, where I can really think about the insights that have come about through the process of writing it down, and those things can offer a huge insights and big shifts in my values or how I am approaching life. From that point of view, I see the dreams of saving me an awful lot of time, where I can process all of the feelings and insights of a situation without having to go through all that effort of interacting with people to accomplish the same thing. 

About 80-90% of my dreams have a music track playing while I dream them, particularly at the end of the dream, but often all the way through it. It's mostly music I have been listening to on Spotify, but occasionally it's something that my brain has just invented, which feels cool when it happens. I also find the act of writing my dream familiarises and expresses my dreaming voice, which is a very soft, informal, creative part of my being, and expressing that voice helps me to bring more of that soft, informal, loose side of myself into the world, I think. 

I have the same recurring nightmare that I'm back working as a lighting technician in the theatre - which I hated. My therapist and I are trying 'Dream Re-scripting'. I hope it works.  

My late mother was a big believer in dream prophecies. She had a 600 page dream interpretation book beside her bedside so she could read it as soon as she woke up.  The book is now lost.

You know what, I totally hadn't considered if this is a medication thing or not. I do take a few different meds for my mental health, so could be a side effect....hmmm...

My dreams are really vivid and deeply weird. Apparently that's a known side effect of the SSRI I'm taking but I've always been this way, I just have a few more dreams like that now.

I get nightmares about being bullied and flashbacks what happened. Managed to say I'm safe. Sometimes I think about nice things.

i have lots of vivid dreams.... some which seem very trippy, im aware and lucid in alot of them, i think when you become aware the dream then tries to turn to horror and reject you, when your aware of it while in it then it seems to attack you as a defence mechanism..

but then i had other dreams that were more than dreams and were more out of body combined with slightly displaced into the future, i saw my parents waking me up in the dream, i woke up and they wasnt there, was going to go to sleep then they came into the room exactly how i saw in my dream. proving my dream was more than a dream and saw the exact future how it was.

Hi Autumn Trees, 

This has happened to me, sometimes, the first time when I was 14 - it seemed so real that I felt disoriented for days afterwards. 

Maybe it's just how we're wired? I don't know..