Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Dreaming

Dreams are big in human life and in fiction. Dreams that come only once may be significant or forgettable; however, I believe, the repetitive dreams are the dramatics of our psyche when it is trying to tell us something.

It is as if a repeating dream is a dramatic play with a designing principle, which tries to make the dreamers confront with their sins, what is ailing them, and the ghosts of their past.

Again like a stage play, the repeating dream has a theme line that says: You must face the truths about yourself and others. Then you must either forgive or deal with those. This theme line, therefore, is the healthy revaluation of our relationship to our dreams, and through them, to each other.

The repeating dream’s scenario has a story world, also. It may be a maze or a jungle you can’t get out of, a dark house full of crannies and nooks where family secrets are hidden away, or a vehicle that keeps transporting you to an alien place, where you don’t want to be in.

Still, like a full-fledged drama, the dream has a symbol line. The fun part is, the dream varies the details of a symbol each time it repeats itself.

The books about dreams usually interpret those symbols. Yet, I am sure for each person those symbols do change; I found, however, a few of such generalized symbols, said to apply to most people, also apply to me. One of them is the house representing the body. If I dream of a house lacking light or with some part broken or missing, I know it’s my psyche telling me something is not quite right with my body. The other is me driving a vehicle. If the vehicle goes out of control in some way, it may show there is something in my life that is gone haywire, in other words, “out of control.”

But a never-ending dream would be a nightmare, a pathology, belonging with serious mental illness, and should anyone have it, to get out of it, they would need intense psychiatric care and medications that would probably fall in the categories of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors, SSRI, or antipsychotics.*

Dreams are the language of a person's subconscious mind. They're a reliable source of insight, personal enrichment, and life affirming revelations. They are what the psychologists use as their primary indicative tools. They are sometimes what our fantasies turn into, which we may succeed to make into reality, but if we can't, there is heartbreak, as the song from Les Miserables says at its end:

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed
The dream I dreamed.

As to the prompt that made me write my thoughts on dreams, it is a great prompt, but it is a prompt for a fictional story. Such a story’s construction should deserve more than the half hour I have for blogging. Probably I can tackle it in the future, in a different book item reserved for short stories.

-----------
*Psychiatric medicine categories mentioned above are gratis from hubby.
-------------

Prompt: Never Ending Dream At an old bookstore, you found a book on interpreting dreams that you just had to have. You fall asleep reading the book and find yourself in a dream that you cannot wake up from.
I can't wait to see your responses!
Prompt: What is it? How will you get back to reality?