Recurring dreams of myself doing horrible things

Hey DV,


I'm wondering if anyone has any insight into recurring dreams in which you do horrible or disturbing things that you would never do in real life. I don't mean recurring as in having the exact same dream every night, but almost every dream I have remembered for a month or two has involved me doing something pretty terrible. I'm starting to believe I must be doing something wrong in my life to keep having these dreams. The strange thing about these dreams is that I don't consider them disturbing or frightening while I'm dreaming, but then when I wake up and remember the dream, I wonder how I am not getting scared in these dreams and thinking about some of them makes me uneasy.


Some examples of stuff I have done in these dreams:

- Killed innocent animals (I feel absolutely awful waking up from these ones...)
- Killed people, or ordered others to kill people
- Done inappropriate things with family members
- Had physical fights with people I am good friends with in RL
- Being searched for by police for horrible crimes


I have had quite a turbulent couple of years, with illnesses in my family, a horrible relationship/break up with a girl, and plenty of financial troubles, but as far as my own actions go, I wouldn't say I have been a "bad person," and I certainly haven't or would ever do anything like I have in these dreams. Of course I have done some stuff I'm not 100% proud of. I haven't been as good of a friend to some as I'd like to be, I have gotten mad at family members, but certainly nothing more than the average person. I have been pretty stressed lately with school work and my financial situation, so I'm sure that is contributing, but I'm not sure if that alone would be the cause of all of these dreams. To me, the most disturbing part of these dreams is that I seem to have no remorse for my actions, except in one of the dreams where I killed an animal with my bare hands to put it out of misery. But like I said earlier, when I wake up I feel awful about what I did in the dream, and it has even made me question my own sanity at times.


Anyone else with similar experiences?



EDIT: I should also mention that I've recently been visiting this board more and started a DJ about a week ago. As a result, I've been remembering more dreams per night, and while not all of them are dreams like these, usually at least one dream per night is still disturbing. And if it's not disturbing because of my actions, then it's something else about the dream that is disturbing.

Yeah, I've had a lot of really really fucked up dreams. To me, it seems like dreams like that come to me when I am really stressed out, and/or suppressing shit. When I say suppressing shit, I just mean emotions, thoughts, desires in general. This does not mean because you killed people with no remorse in dreams that you desire to kill people in waking life.

I suggest when you have dreams like that, just let it go, and don't worry about attributing any specific meaning to them, than just mental clutter. Sounds like you need to chill out in your waking life.