I'm at home, on Canada Day, alone with no kids. What that means is that my mind has time and space to do some reflecting. For many years, my dreams have been filled with horror....the ones I remember anyway. And the ones that I didn't remember? Well they may have been good but to be honest, I can't tell you because I don't remember.... ;-p
So dreams. There are many different psychological stances on dreams, and many different ways to interpret dreams. Many of the famous psychologists have some sort of stance on dreams but what they boil down to is that dreams are our mind's way of processing things.
However, that specific mechanism breaks down in the face of repeated and prolonged exposure to trauma. And this is where the interesting point for me comes in. What I have noticed from my own experience is this: after processing and dealing with trauma, those natural mechanisms we have that are built into us, experience something of a resurrection. They come back to life in a manner of speaking.
To clarify this point. On Tuesday, I had a particularly upsetting experience that spilled over into Wednesday. This experience impacted me to the degree that it brought me to the point of tears on a number of different occasions which in turn led me to have conversations with both of my supervisor's in order to gain clarification and processing. So some closure was brought to this situation as of last night.
Through the night, I woke up with two different dreams. As I reflected on these dreams, the themes that were evident were directly tied to my experience. The theme in the first dream was that of vulnerability and attack. Said experience was a mix of my feeling both vulnerable and attacked. The second dream was a move toward competence and empowerment. After having lived through part two of this experience and coming out of it, as well as processing it on a verbal level with my supervisor's, my brain had the resources to go back through the experience and bring the closure and processing of competence back. The verbal processing helped in the immediate. The second dream dealt with the inner and emotional processing so that I don't continue to sit in and live in the trauma of that experience.
Dreams are very cool things and if we keep our eye on them have the ability to tell us a world of things about ourselves. Pay attention to your dreams..........you never know what you will find!
