Attempting to speak to my subconscious mind. (Got DARK fast)

So recently I read that a person could speak to dream characters as an avenue for communicating directly to their subconscious, and that one could sometimes get valuable insights into themselves by listening to what the dream characters said.

So the other night while I was dreaming, I eventually became lucid. Somewhere along the line I remembered that I had wanted to try speaking with my subconscious mind to see what it would say. I was in the atrium at school at that point of the dream and there were people walking all around going about their business. I stopped an older woman by putting a hand on her shoulder.

"Subconscious me?" I said, deciding that this dream character would be my proxy to subconsciousness. She turned and looked at me.

"Yes? What is it?" she asked.

"Is there anything you want me to know?" I asked. She stared at me for a long moment then grimaced. Suddenly the woman was gone and in her place was another woman hanging by the neck from the ceiling. (I think it may have been me, though I didn't get a good look. The sudden shock of seeing a dead person shocked me awake.)

Sooo....
That was not what I hoped to see.
Has anyone ever had an experience like that when trying to speak to their subconscious before? What could be the cause of this? I'm not suicidal by any means. But I do suffer from clinical depression. Could this mean something? Or was it just a fluke caused by my own nervousness about talking to my subconscious? What do you guys think? should I be worried?

I’ve encountered something similar once before—and, given how disturbing the imagery was, I devoted a lot of thought to it afterwards. The conclusion I eventually came to was that my attempt to access subconscious knowledge had the potential to do me harm. In other words: what you saw was probably not an answer to your question—rather, it was a reflection of it. So no, it's not something to be worried about, but you might not want to make another attempt for a while - at least, not such a direct one.

My attempt was actually through dream incubation rather than through lucid dreaming—this was a time before I had managed to maintain lucidity for more than a few seconds. And in my case, I had already received a clear response the previous night telling me that I'd have to work things out for myself. By persisting for a second night, I was pushing it, and so I could understand in retrospect why I had received such an extreme response. I definitely wouldn’t have expected it from an open-ended question like the one you asked—but this is territory not a lot of people have explored, and so I guess we should go into it prepared to be surprised.

What I would suggest, if this is something you’re intent on pursuing, is to spend some time observing your dreams and trying to understand them. Weigh your observations against what different psychologists have claimed about them. Make sure that your conscious mind has at least a handle on how your subconscious mind operates before making a second attempt. And possibly, once you have more practice at reading it, you might get an answer. And, in the future, you may be able to tell yourself “back off” in a less shocking way.

If you talk to your subconscious and you get something dark, that's your subconscious telling you that your head is in a dark place! Even if you don't notice it!
This is an encouragement to start thinking more positive. You're torturing yourself. It can be difficult to get out of patterns of torturing yourself, I know because I've been there. But it all starts with opening yourself up to positivity!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by slash112

If you talk to your subconscious and you get something dark, that's your subconscious telling you that your head is in a dark place! Even if you don't notice it!

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Yeah, or possibly this. Negative expectations can turn dream imagery nightmarish—and that could be the case here. Again, I wouldn’t think a simple inquiry would receive such a dramatic response, and that would be consistent with negative expectations at work. But, as with pretty much everything that have the potential of helping us, working with dreams has the potential to hurt us as well, and anyone who’s trying to explore the deeper levels of the psyche ought to be aware of that going in.

I strongly suspect the psyche has its own ways of keeping our conscious selves from unintentionally causing damage when our power exceeds our knowledge, and pretty robust ones. (In part because I was constantly rubbing up against them when my own explorations were in their early stages—but that’s another story.) As lucid dreamers, or aspiring ones, I’m sure the training of most of us here have undergone was heavily focused on how to achieve greater control over our dreams—that is, power. Which is just fine as long as we see ourselves as playing around in a self-created simulation, but if it’s meaningful intra-psychic interaction we’re trying for, we’re playing by a different set of rules. But I don’t want to write an essay here—just draw attention to something that might otherwise get overlooked.