reoccuring dreams, real life stress

Currently looking for some new insight into some reoccurring dreams my sister has been having for years now.

Spoiler for the details:

They center around a person she has known since preschool, and for whatever reason there is always some obstacle between them, preventing them from communicating or interacting. The circumstances vary, but the theme is always the same. Whether it's bad weather or bad timing or you name it, they are both in the dream but somehow separated.

Now mind you, in waking life this person has been a longtime friend. They shared similar interests, some of the same classes, and a lot of the same friends all throughout highschool. They even tried dating once back then but it only lasted a week because they were just too good as friends, basically . And that was more than a decade ago.

Cut to the present where life goes on and they havent spoken in many years but yet she has these dreams.

At first I think they just seemed random the way most dreams do, but over the years they persisted, and also became increasingly unrealistic with regard to her waking life. In the dreams relationships were starting to be implied (unrealistic ones) but again there were obstacles...it's always something no matter what the scenario.

And then most recently, she had a dream that she was having a baby shower for the baby she and this guy were having together (he is married IRL, btw), and the guy's wife was the one conceiving the child for them.

When she told me this, I'll admit I was a little shocked.

But I was even more shocked when she told me that the day after she had that particular dream, she saw on Facebook that in fact his wife had just given birth to their second child. His wife is a highschool friend of hers as well, and although my sister knew they were expecting, she did not know when.

Coincidence? You be the judge.

All I know for sure is that as her dreams have progressed, she has had resulting anxiety carry over into her waking life, particularly during a period a few months back where she was having them on a nightly basis for more than a week.

Now, I've had a lot of reoccurring dreams and some pretty gnarly nightmares, but never in such close succession and over a prolonged period of time. Even if that only happens once in a few years, it sounds slightly atypical to me. But of even greater concern to me is the anxiety she is developing around these dreams.

I have done my best to remind her that dreams can be unpredictable and unruly, and that dream interpretation is a very personal business...and that in her case there seems to be obvious potential for subconscious preoccupation....nothing so far has helped.

The conflict in the dream began with a basis in reality I think, but now that they've become absurd and nightmarish she wishes she could just make them disappear. She doesn't even desire to speak with him, as the dreams might suggest.



She has begun to stress the dreams too much, as I see it.

This stress seems outside her personality a bit, so I feel compelled to help . In my opinion, no one should start a day out badly simply because of a bad dream.

Any thoughts on this, or any advice i could give her would be very greatly appreciated.


EDIT: her specific questions are "why do I keep having them, why does the storyline keep progressing, and what do the dreams mean?"

Good Morning acatalephobic,

It sounds quite literal the "dreams" that your sister is having. Therefore I would say she is having more of a vision than a dream. Dreams are always metaphorical and visions are very literal. Visions are more costly because they carry a clarity that dreams do not. This might explain why she was able to dream of her friend's partner giving birth the night before she actually did!

Why is she having re-occurring "visions"? It is because G-d is highlighting the connection she has to her friend and wants her to either pray for him at different times based on what she "sees" or to simply re-connect with him in real life and be a supportive friend again.

You haven't given us much about the "dreams" themselves and how they seem progressively like nightmares to her, so this is what I have to go on so far.

Adam.

Thank you for your response, Adam.
I should have been more clear though, maybe.

At first the dream scenarios themselves weren't nightmarish, but they have taken on this tone over time due to their persistence and also their increasingly unrealistic scenarios.

I believe that a kind of guilt she has about these dreams has led to them taking on this nightmarish quality. She feels guilty because he is happily married to a former friend of hers. She says she does not desire any kind of relationship with him, and when I suggested getting in touch with him might alleviate her sense of an "obstacle between them" she said she doesn't even necessarily want that.

I tried to explain to her that its nonsensical to feel guilty about dreams, especially when she is unable to control them. But over the years I think she feels increasingly guilty about having them.

I'm not looking for any specific advice necessarily, just a new way to look at this thing...or some new insight that might help her understand her situation a little better.

Thanks again!

Okay - well you can definitely reassure her that her dreams about this friend are not to be taken literally and it does not suggest she is looking to do anything immoral with him. She should not feel guilty about them.

No telling why it all started - possibly she saw something there way back in the dawn of life - possibly a potential life with this guy and when life intervened she might have felt a sense of loss. Not of him, but of the potential situation, and he became a symbol of it. I had a particular incident in childhood that I had no understanding of at the time but that was very important to me and I never forgot, and it's become deeply symbolic for me now that I understand it better. For whatever reason though, she had some kind of powerful emotions surrounding this person and a sense of separation - probably not from him specifically but from whatever she thought could have been and he was somehow associated with it. So those dreams had extra significance for her and she paid a lot of attention to them, which of course begins a self-perpetuating cycle. By putting more and more attention and anxiety into the dream scenarios she just makes them become stronger. And I'm assuming whatever began it all was something with a lot of emotional resonance, at a very formative period in her life, so it has enough power to keep showing up again and again. But in the same way that memories are altered every time we recall them, these dreams probably no longer have any direct relevance to whatever inspired the first ones. Since then it's become an obsession of hers that she perpetrates by giving it more attention and emotional significance.

I hope this helps. I can give you some ideas if it does.
HowStuffWorks "Recurring Dreams and Nightmares"

Thank you all for the very helpful responses!

I thought things were more or less under control until she had the intense coincidence-type dream recently. I think that one in particular seemed at least as shocking to her as it was to me, so i assume it caused some resurgence in her desire to understand the dreams better.

In the past I have suggested lucid dreaming to her because learning about it has helped tremendously with my own nightmares. Perhaps I should bring it up again and see if it might help.

Only trouble is she has a very hard time falling asleep. In my opinion though, this is all the more reason to improve the quality of sleep she does get.

Many thanks again! =}