Reoccurring dreams about someone from my past.

I had a really bad dream last night that pretty much killed any good mood I would have had today before my day even started. My mom was married to a guy for a while and he did something last year that really traumatized me. She separated from him as soon as I told her what had happened so I haven't seen him since and if it's absolutely necessary to share what he did, I'll explain it. But basically I had a dream that he moved back in and remarried my mom. Obviously I don't want either to happen much less exist in the same city as him. So what could this possibly mean?

Also, is there a way to avoid dreaming about someone who has put you through a traumatic situation? It's been almost a year since this happened and I'll go weeks, sometimes even months feeling emotionally fine and then all of the sudden I'll have a dream about him again and it sends me right back to that to day and I feel traumatized all over again.[/FONT][/FONT]

Hello starsinthesky. It isn't necessary to tell us what happened. I'm really sorry to read about it. Generally, dreams are formed from our memories. It would only stand to reason that the heavier/more intense memories – like really happy ones or really sad ones – come up more frequently. That is probably why you dream about that certain scenario happening from time to time.

As for avoiding dreams about it.. I don't think there is really a fool-proof way to guarantee that. My advice would be to focus on something else in order to shift your attention. You can try to incubate your own preferred dreams if you want. Basically you visualize or imagine your preferred dream scenario many times, and the idea is that it will sooner or later pop up in your dreams instead of the other ones.

On a slightly different note, have you ever thought about lucid dreaming? There are many benefits to lucids dreaming, and one of them is to face your fears or take care of certain situations. I have known many people around this site that used lucid dreaming to confront nightmares, and even ask the dream why it's happening and to make them go away. It's really amazing.


Good luck :)

Let's face it, we cannot control all of our dreams, and some will turn out to be nightmares. So what can be done about this? A lot. For instance, give yourself permission to have such bad dreams, tell yourself that it's fine, and go through with the dream. We will all have to kind of dreams. The key is that once you become aware of that dream, you are then in power to give meaning to that dream. You have the energy to interpret that dream as to however you want to interpret it. Maybe you can be thankful that you had such a dream so it can be a reminder of what you overcame, and you feel inspired now to move forward? The dream can help you never forget a part of your life, something that happened, and now you have the will to use that to become a better person and help those around you with similar issues.

Give yourself that right to use bad dreams to build something constructive and positive. Those bad dreams are just energies telling you about a certain event, now you have the power to interpret that dream as you wish.