Skin decay, Air bubbles and my back

[groupieluv]

Hello! I am 16 years old, I am a female and I have been going through a period of depression. I don't know if that might be a helpful bit of detail. I am new here. My dreams have been somewhat non existent for the past 4 months until last night at a friend's house. We spent the entire night at a Tim Hortons, and we headed back at 4:55am. I fell asleep at 5:45am and slept until 10am. My friend has woken me up because she was babysitting her younger siblings and needed help. In the dream I was without a shirt but I could only see my back. I was viewing things from a third person POV. I saw air bubbles of thin skin develop on my back, similar to blisters but without the watery stuff. They got bigger and bigger. I felt panic in the dream and ripped the skin open and I thought after I had peeled the air bubbles off my back I was fine. Then the next thing I knew my third person POV changed which direction I was looking at for one second. I look at my back again and the skin is peeling and rotting off to the point where I can see my ribs. The middle of my back between the lowest part of my shoulder blades was rotting off in chunks. I didn't have time to assess my emotions in the dream, because my friend woke me up. I didn't wake up scared or with a quickened heartbeat. I was relitivley fine. I have been having suicidal thoughts, I've been depressed, I haven't really felt any feeling for 4 months. Which I think may be an explination as to why I haven't had any dreams. But the sudden recent dream has caught me off guard. Any help in determining what this means, Is thanked ! -AJ

[Darkmatters]

One thing I can tell you about dreams, that I've read and also know is true from personal experience, is that once something frightens you in a dream it will multiply. That can mean several different things - it can get bigger, become stronger and more aggressive, or more of them can appear. For instance some of my nightmare creatures are fierce dogs, bears and dinosaurs. As soon as one of them appears I get scared (usually) and then they either get bigger, more of them appear, or they get way more aggressive. This is just the effect fear has on the mind - waking or sleep. The key is to develop an attitude of fearlessness. As soon as you can do that then the problem will stop. In fact I have also learned that you can completely change your attitude and transform whatever is scaring you into a helper. You do this by fully accepting or even sending love to whatever it is. I know your case is a little different - it isn't nightmare creatures, but it is similar. If you start to really take an interest in your dreams you will learn to recognize when things like this happen (skin blistering ridiculously fast or whatever) and that it means this is a dream, and so there's nothing to be afraid of. Then you can approach it with no fear and in fact take an interest in it. For example press your finger into the blisters just to see what happens. As soon as there's no fear and you're showing a positive interest the whole emotional attitude of the dreams reverses and it becomes positive. To explain what that means - I had read that when you see a nightmare creature in a dream you should try sending love to it rather than fear. So I saw a bear laying on the floor in the corner of a warehouse - I immediately knew I was dreaming because there are no bears around here except in my dreams, and that made me go lucid. I started flying toward it with my arms out for a big bear hug, and as I approached it changed. It sort of visually transformed into 2 dogs - but not scary ones. They were 2 of my dogs, one of which had died years ago. The dream made it seem like I had just seen them wrong and their bodies somehow looked like a bear. They started wagging their tails as I approached, and then in a brief segment one of them became a cartoon dog like MacGruff the Crime Dog in a trench coat and we sat at a cafeteria table and talked. So the only reason your blisters kept getting worse was because you fed them with fear. Knowing this takes a lot of the fear out of it - in fact it's like the one president said in the famous speech - the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

[Darkmatters]

In fact I realized - if you can learn how to accept or love these nightmarish visions when they happen and expect them to turn positive - something like your skin peeling off could reveal a better new you underneath, like 'shedding your skin' as a metaphor for transformation. Like a caterpillar going into chrysalis and emerging as a butterfly, or like a locust shedding it's skin and stepping out looking very different in its new form.