Dreams

I've tried many times over the years to engage in dreamwork. It's generally presented as lucid dreaming being a requirement, regardless of what type of work one is doing or for what purpose, and that's the big problem for me. Personal advice from practioners, books on the subject...it always comes back to, "When you become aware that you are dreaming..." That doesn't happen for me. Okay, it does. When I wake up and realize I had been dreaming.

Chants, mantras, guided meditations before sleep, stating intent... All those things so many people claim will make this happen! It just doesn't work for me. I've been a bit jealous at times of someone I know who is such a natural lucid dreamer that they were surprised to find out many people work to build it as a skill. This person has no desire to do any kind of dreamwork. It's just an interesting thing to them that they are aware of the dreaming and can shut it off if they have nightmares.

Something I learned in PTSD therapy is that my inability to dream lucidly may be connected somehow to how I get trapped in trauma-related nightmares. The nightmares don't happen as often as they  used to. They used to be so common I was sometimes afraid to sleep. They happen maybe a couple of times a year now. Within those nightmares, I reach a point where everything shifts and I wake up within the dream. I will recognize that what happened before was a dream, but not that I am actually still dreaming. These can be the worst nightmares. It only happens when I'm reliving a traumatic event in my sleep, and there have been a few times that the whole thing repeated enough times that I was terribly shaken and couldn't trust that I truly was awake for the first couple of hours after I woke up.

Most of the time, though, I either don't remember having dreams, or they are really weird and vivid as long as I'm asleep and fade quickly after I wake up. "Weird" in those kinds of dreams means things like, as an adult, I once dreamed my adult self was on a long roadtrip with my grandfather to stop and collect the kids meal toys from every Burger King. There was nothing there I could tie to waking life. No roadtrips. No great love of Burger King. No odd memories about eating at one with my grandfather once. Just weird.

Then there's the other kind of vivid dreams I have, and these stick with me. I'll still be able to remember them in detail years later. These are the dreams in which I am being communicated with. That's how my grandmother told me she had died about an hour before I got the phone call. That's how my father explained to me why he died. And that's how our house has been trying to tell me something.

Our house wasn't always a house. We know the building's history. There's nothing sinister or mysterious about it. It simply wasn't always a house, and we know what the building was for before it became our house. Ever since we moved here, I periodically have dreams of large buildings that weren't built to be houses, but people are living in them and the rooms keep changing. Or I go through a room in the dream that is what one would expect in a house, then step through a doorway into a working business, and then the next doorway will take me back into a room from a house. Another member of the family had a very similar dream not long after we moved here, but I'm the only one who keeps having these dreams. 

I don't know yet what the house is trying to tell me, but this has happened for the past two nights. It's never happened more than one night at a time before, and there've never been any buildings or rooms in the dreams that I recognize from my waking life before. This time, I'm recognizing places. A church my family belonged to many years ago. The elementary school I went to. A popular shopping center in the area where I grew up. Places from my childhood that have strong personal connections for me. Maybe the house and I will come to a point soon where proper communication becomes possible.