a girl and her dreams

I dream about people who I have had traumatic experiences with, that’s evident by now. It’s healthy in my opinion, it means emotions are coming up as well as new opportunities for releasing what is weighing me down and holding me back. I’ve even woken up crying because my dreams have either opened up a part of me that I hadn’t developed quite fully (due to avoidance) or healed completely (ex. autonomy). Or crying because the dream felt so real that I thought what was happening to me what really happening.

I live on the ocean, the cold here is so deep, it penetrates my bones right through the core. I’m a tiny person, like 5 ft, 110 lbs – I get freakin’ cold in winter. At the same time, I actually love the cold, I lived up north for the early parts of my childhood, so I kind of thrive on it. I have found that it’s super healing for me, it pushes me to self soothe. The ocean cold is different than the north cold though, it’s harder to handle now that I’m older. I was more adaptable in my teens, I loved swimming in the ocean, especially at night when it was extra challenging to take the shock. Now it’s gross, I don’t trust the ocean like that anymore.

The long days of working and getting my house sorted and kids fed during this winter has made me just want my bed. So, the first couple months of the season I was sleeping a lot. This last month of winter, my soul has been restless, wanting to get out and plant things, play with the kids, etc. so I haven’t slept much. Then when the first signs of Spring appeared in the beginning of March, my brain wouldn’t shut off when I wanted to go to bed. I was seeing flowers sprouting, birds foraging, blue skies breaking even in my imagination after I snuggled under the covers. I still can’t seem to turn the visuals off even after herbal tea, hot baths, reading, stretching. I am obviously excited to be done with winter. Nevertheless, I need sleep, and last night I put an end to staying up late. I hypnotized myself. I set an intention that at 11:11pm I was done.

It was about 11:20pm when I had finished bedtime routine and got into bed. I attempted to do a tarot reading and felt loopy within minutes, I guess getting into bed physically was the secret. I had been procrastinating nightly sitting on the couch on my laptop for weeks. But by 11:30 was curled up and drifting off.

There were no phases before REM this time, I fell (asleep) so hard that I was lucid almost immediately. I arrived at this dream softly. It was about a time in my life that was the hardest where most of my trauma happened. Let me explain this time: When I was a teenager, I did some couch surfing at an apartment that belonged to these 2 men, it was during my most tumultuous teen years. They were fine at first, and lots of other younger people were around because it was a spiritual community I joined. But sadly, almost all of us had bad experiences as younger people with older people. I became close with one of the girls my age, we lived together and exhibited very similar behaviors with our parents. Both of us trying to get our parents to understand our uniqueness and how we differed from atypical teenagers.

What I really wanted was to be living at home and, be “allowed” to sleep and recover from so much of the combined bullying and inherited family trauma. I didn’t think it was that hard to understand. It was my theory on how a person with complex childhood trauma could heal and regain autonomy. But my parents would not understand that. Perhaps it was too early in human evolution to propose to average parents that trauma was a rising medical problem in the mental health world. I felt it was worthy of a diagnosis of its own: emotional trauma disorder. But, because I was seen as dysfunctional by choice, I was not permitted to live at home. Until I could meet their expectations I was not allowed to live there. Hence why I was couch surfing.

In this dream I approached a scene with the 2 men, they were at the top of a staircase on a landing with a small booth. Both of them were dressed formally and talking to some kind of authorities in the booth through a window. I was trying to be seen but no was acknowledging me, and I couldn’t get anyone’s attention. I started to feel like I was watching teenager me, and my empathy for her grew. I saw that I was unimportant to them and I had to find a way to survive on my own.

I noted in particular that I had a very feminine presence, my clothes were soft pastel colors and “flowy”. I was possessing desirable qualities that I needed to cultivate and protect. I deserved more. I started rising up a hill behind me (not walking like in my human body but rising like a fog lifts) which was symbolic of my return to self. I ended up in a different building (far from them) in a dark hallway and that was where my vision adjusted. I started seeing through “special eyes”, with the ability to see the men wherever they were so that I could make sure they didn’t find me.

Then I made my way onto a bus, but it was like I was dreaming within a dream, and the layer of both dream states gave me this ability of psychic intuition about this bus. The bus was in a busy city, like Mexico, where they drive very fast. I’ve experienced it myself, it’s scary. In fact, I was in Mexico at 17, I had never been on bus driving that fast before. The dream bus driver was a reflection of a masculine side of me, a higher power, a part of myself that is protective and strong. The psychic gift was without doubt from a higher realm. This was like divine intervention to protect my autonomy; it must have been very difficult for my higher powers when I was a teenager.

I had a view into the bus as if I was looking through a security camera from the back of the bus. I was able to see the driver clearly. Every time the bus was about to stop, I had a feeling that the bus was going to crash. Then it wouldn’t. The driver would somehow maintain control. Then I would get that feeling again that it was going to crash as it approached the next stop. The driver again stopped without even seeming to notice the danger I was feeling. He did however seem engaged with me, like he was working with me on my safety in this dream. I realized that I was metaphorically looking back on when I was “driving the bus” in my teen years. My dream was assuring me that all that time, I had done a good job taking care of myself when I wasn’t being taken care of as a teenager. I shouldn’t have had to grow up so fast. I think that I was lucky to have such strong ties with higher powers.

All of sudden (my dreams are notorious for just jumping into a completely different subject) I was in a small bedroom with my middle daughter. When I dream of being inside a house, or a building, I see it as a part of myself. The lighting in my dreams would be impossible to find in any lighting store. This room was small, with low ceilings, likely because this part of me is very restricted and limited right now. It is still more cozy and esthetic than any room I’ve seen in the waking world. Nothing matches dream rooms.

In my dream, my middle was being difficult, and I called her a brat. I was being so mean to her, making her go to her bunk bed and not letting her “talk back” to me. It made me so sad that I was being so horrible. I couldn’t control myself and it was upsetting because my intentions as a mother are to be tender, sweet and emotionally in tune with my children. But I think this was more about the way my inner child felt about having to grow up so fast. And how it was bleeding through into my most sensitive child’s life. I think I need to be more aware of it. Which I took to heart right there in my dream.

An overwhelming sensation of deep and profound love (for her as her mother) came over me. Emotions tend to be overcoming in dreams. For me. My reaction was to pull myself back away from the room and check in with my conscience. Standing there looking at her in the little oversized dollhouse like room, my heart broke, and I said sorry to her. My heart still sinking, I stood petrified, coming to terms with the effects of trauma touching all of our lives, me and my girls.

My brain was tricked thinking that I had been sleeping for hours, that morning was approaching. I was then just about to go into a sleep paralysis, and when this happens, I usually see some colors and shapes moving past my head like bees or wasps. It gets its clutches on me quickly, usually before I even have a chance to notice it. But I was so focused on my heart aching for my little girl, that I consciously bypassed the paralysis several times, and completely uninvited it.

The lack of rest over the last couple weeks was wearing me down and normally I would struggle with dreaming, and if anything, sleep paralysis would dominate. But I didn’t let sleep deprivation push me that way this time. Instead, I was blessed with a heart opening exercise as a mother, that will shape my future with my daughter for the better. My compassion for her is what eventually woke me up.

I was super surprised that it was only 11:53pm. It hadn’t even been 20 minutes since I fell asleep. I had the whole night ahead of me to rest which I did. And though I didn’t lucid dream again – I did dream. The layer of dreams that I drifted through for the rest of the night are interwoven in maps that eventually lead me to lucid dreams. It is by design and has many reoccurring themes, matrixes and signatures that I have built my whole life.

I worked through the surfacing feelings in the morning over coffee, it has been a difficult day of processing. I started off remembering that in real life last night, before my middle girl went to bed (before I went to bed) I said that her and her sister could “have a sleepover in mom’s big bed”. Then while reading books together on the couch, I realized that both of them were getting sniffly and on the verge of getting a cold. “We just got over a virus, I can’t get sick again, you guys can’t sleep in my room.” I said. And it’s true, when I get sick it destroys my life, I mean if I can’t work…I don’t get paid for sick days. My immune system is doing some serious healing from an illness caused by serious bathroom plumbing pipe mold in a house we lived in a couple years ago. I was setting a healthy boundary.

I remember my middle was so sad last night and I was too, and it was hard to resist caving. In the dream I think I was questioning whether or not I severely hurt my middle child’s feelings, and it made my heart break a little. Maybe it was an exaggeration and I’m overthinking. However it goes, I love her and felt so bad.

My 2 youngest girl’s father is one of the men I had dreamt of last night, I was in love with him for many years, and most of my needs were not met in that relationship. I know the dream was telling me that I got control of my life and took my power back so that I can be the best mother for my girls. This was reassuring and so healing for my nervous system. But I didn’t overlook that I still felt the effects of my trauma around me while “driving the bus”. The shakiness of the bus and the premonitions that it was going to crash if I didn’t acknowledge the dangers – those were real parts of my story.

What was right for others wasn’t right for me in my teens. I needed sleep. I made sacrifices to survive; I compromised what I had to because it was my only choice. So I would carefully “choose what to lose”, and in hindsight I became my own parent. When I was old enough to walk away, I lost family members and people that I thought were my friends, but they weren’t there for me anyway. So not my loss.

I think the take-away from these kinds of dreams for me is that I chose to fight for myself and in turn for my kids. I left dysfunction behind. I wasn’t going to let my past trauma destroy my future dreams.

Our personal perception of ourselves is so important, we have the right to protection. Our safety is a birthright that can be violated in one moment, yet it can take years to reclaim. In this world, it is difficult to survive after growing up in unpredictable environments. I have found that this narrative changes in my dreams and I am able to focus on rewiring my brain to a state of love and trust. The things about my life that I needed my parents to acknowledge were ignored. I had to self-advocate against a society that just expects everyone no matter their condition to “contribute”. We are so wrapped up in finances, goals, etc. that we lose connection to our emotions. We may think that the world is fulfilling those needs, but no. The world is running on a Gregorian calendar and limited to the physical senses and what our human brain can process while awake. No one sleeps while at work, no one dreams while driving home, we don’t even talk about what goes on in these parts of ourselves or our inner world. Not the way we do about this “life”.

My next post will be more about that inner sanctum, the one that lots of people don’t even explore. It is where many of my own mental health issues are treated when I am not able to get help or refused adequate care. Be thine own doctor. Because I was refused by my parents and often left to fend for myself with my mental health, I have internalized a lot of my traumatic experiences. When I dream, I am able to rewrite these experiences and turn them into wisdom and healing. That is medicine.

It was hard to understand me as a teenager, in terms of verbal communication around my mental challenges. I think that goes for anyone who has a neurodivergent brain. In essence, the “crazy place” that people go to when they’re struggling with mental health is actually in hindsight a dream-like state. And I’ll go into that more next post.

We could be just as connected if not more, to each other through dreams as we are through reality. We could build communities based on dreams rather than just reality. We could build relationship through dream life as much as we do real life. And what if we did? Literally, dreams will inevitably find their place just like every other part of our evolutionary existence.

Perhaps the percentage of people like me who are less functional because of complex childhood trauma, is small.

We are often seen as “high needs” or “unemployable” or “unproductive”, and that’s one language to use. Another one is “highly gifted” or “creative” or “pragmatic”. When we change the language, we change the barrier to a benefit. My conscience would not allow me to force myself to plow through my trauma, just in order to get a job and live with my parents. There was no option to grow up and be a “normal” person. I don’t think many ppl understood the gravity of the situation, especially my parents. I was paralyzed emotionally and there was nothing that could change that but sleep, rest and recovery. We are in an era where negativity is prevalent in every aspect of life. Yet we are expected to be positive. And work. I went against that grain. I prioritized my mental health, emotional well-being, and my dreams. My dreams educated me.

My parents and social workers, doctors and mental health workers would say to me when I was depressed that I was resisting help. I didn’t argue, I refused meds until I felt that I had found the right support at 26. For over a decade I debated with my parents and anyone in the system about the causes of mental illness. They claimed it was genetic, that it was something wrong in the brain. I fought that hard, insisting that trauma could be passed down through ancestral lineages, that healing was not possible without recognizing trauma in the family, as a family. They retorted that the possibilities were endless in this world with medication, and that I needed to be open to help. They were wrong. In this world, possibilities are definitely limited. Medication is useless without psychotherapy.

In the dream world, possibilities are endless. Do you know why? Because it’s better there. (that’s my answer for now)

Healing begins inside of ourselves. No medication, treatment plan or recovery program will match the power of self-healing. When we choose to heal ourselves, we allow others to heal themselves. I chose to heal my family wounds, even the emotional injuries from friendships, because I want my kids to have a mother that is willing to break vicious cycles. Putting others first and thinking it would benefit me was a mistake. I did it until I couldn’t do it anymore, I burnt out. I only tried to face the world like an adult when I was a kid because my parents did. Monkey see, monkey do. The pattern needed to end. Holding on to pain, blocking it out and faking the ability to push through and produce results for the sake of being accepted, seen as a normal person, and “succeeding”…was self-destruction. Self-abandonment. Selfish of everyone else around me who knew I needed support – not to keep supporting everyone else.

It’s no wonder our society has so many conflicts.

Dreams are the perfect climate for healing. The system is far from perfect and I hope it changes, but that can only happen when people are willing to see it and do something about it.

I will always be an advocate for sleep, dreams and taking care of self first.

Drive your bus. It’s your journey.

a girl and her dreams

image: Coach Driver in Vehicle · Free Stock Photo