Accessing memories that were buried, unresolved, or traumatic?

Sorry this is a heavy topic. I have to be specific to explain it. I have done EMDR therapy, eye movement reprocessing of traumatic incidents. Most of which I had complete memory of, but EMDR is known to increase nightmares, and it brought up some older unresolved memories.

They are very incomplete. I only know parts of them are true. Anyway, I will have this recurring dream since about three years ago. Maybe 6 times or so total. And I'm asking the person what happened (the person is deceased in real life, can't ask them). I then see my child self as a separate person in the dream, she sometimes talks to me, he starts to tell me, it flashes to a scene with the same theme every time and I wake up heart racing and scared like I purposely "left" the dream and decided I didn't want to know.

I always want to know, until it comes to that moment in the dream. I'm the one asking. But I always leave.

Sorry if this doesn't make sense. This site seems very knowledgable about dreaming and I've always thought, since I've been a vivid dreamer for many years, a creative in real life, that more studies should be done on dreaming and the psyche. I would love to hear your thoughts or see if anyone's experienced anything similar, if anyone here has questions in real life that they go to ask in a dream, but it's traumatic or unresolved, how do you resolve it? Can it be resolved in a dream??

Hi
It reminds me a dissociation or shamanic theories about the loss of part of soul.
Acording to this theories traumatic event cause disociation of memory and sometimes also part of self its a protective mechanizm. Hard to say how much disociaced older self really exist as separated person or if it is only representation/interface but in bouth cases is posisble use it to solve issue.

I read about this few years ago and about 2 month ago i helping one person and found in them part of memory where he did not have access. I try go there nad navigate person there by some kind of telepathy/astral travel . I imagine/precieve somthing like memory bubble and try to go inside when i go inside i feel strong emotions and in some cases found old self of persona comunicate with him explan him situation and try to establish communication with the current conscious and subconscious of the person. It work mainly on subconscious level but person feel some emotion and have flashes of old meories .It help solve some psychic issues.

About 2 weeks after that i try same techniqe in myself i try fuct do scan of my mind for part of memory where i dount have acces , i do it from "astral" hard to say how much is true use other dimensions or if it is only concept to help.I found 173 cases. After that i try go to astral by intention (normaly during day without any preparation) ad pic one of cases and imagine it as a bubble. I try put mi finger trought bubble and precive what is inside.I try about 20 cases . In some cases emotion was very intense and i cant solve this at the momnet. Some bubbles also have somthing like layers with deaper and even stronger emotions/memories.
When i acces the bubble i usuayl feel some emotion sometimes fashes of memory in few times i have vision /met my older self and comunicate with him , ask him what happent how i can help him . If it work ok bubble start disappearing and memory nad old part of self integrate to me .

Itcan be resolved in dream but probaly better try some kind of meditation and contact older self in this memory. To solve this you will probably ned few techniqes how to work with strong emotion how to change precived intesity of them or 3rd person perspective . Also get some experinece by solving normal emotion.

Exsact method and argumets for soving higly depent of stuation and emotions in it and your life experince ad experince with working on emotions.

Hi ATA, thanks for your reply. This is interesting because I have experienced derealization and depersonalization, no loss of time or identity disorder, but definite dissociation, at times feeling disconnected from myself or ungrounded.

I wonder how to communicate between the current conscious and the subconscious. Is there a type of therapy, dream work, or mainly meditating with the intention of looking at it?

Have you heard of EMDR?

Hope the intense emotion is more at ease for you to solve as you try. I'm never fully in control of my dreams, so maybe meditation would help. Lately I've been trying compassion meditation (including self-compassion) and mantras, but I could do a more open-ended one looking into what comes up in my dreams.

Hi
Is hard to describe some universal method i use combination of many like use of pendulum , intention , shamanic travel and my own concepts , models nad techniqes.

i heard of EMDR but not know much about it . I supouse it work because eye movemts are needet to reconstruct memory if you block eye movement or use voluntary movemnts of eyes when remembering .
Reconstruction is obstructed and emotion link form memory is only partialy activated. After each remembering memory must be saved again becouse emotion was paritaly blost newly saved memory will have weaker emotion. If you repeat it may times saved emotion linked to memory become weaker.Its usefull but very slow proces.

Last 2 weaks i worked on my burried memories and disociated pars of myslef and some experence how to work with that .

You can contact me on https://www.facebook.com/petr.navratil.37
and we can try few techniqes is better to do it in real time because it can be little bit dangerous.

I don't really know a lot about this, but I wanted to offer some ideas.

There's a good book that talks about this sort of stuff. It's called Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole by Robert Moss. I haven't read it personally, but Moss is a great author and shaman who really knows his stuff. You might want to check it out.

Also, you could try setting intentions to face any dream fear that arises. What I'd do is set intentions over the course of a few days or more, and write it down every night. Put it under your pillow. Getting lucid would help a lot.

It also might help to try and purposefully face (safe) fears in real life, just to build up resilience to fear.

ATA sounds like he has some really great methods, good luck, I hope you can resolve this. :)

Because you are a creative person, you probably would like the approach to dreams and therapy that the Jungian school of psychology practices.

They continue to believe as Carl Jung himself did that dream interpretation and therapy involve both art and science as opposed to a broad kind of intellectual and often dry approach.

Also, to paraphrase Dr. Jung regarding the therapeutic effect of an analyst, “It’s not what you know but who you are that’s important”.

I believe that there are two books which would be helpful and you don’t need to find out about Jungian psychology first in order to understand them.

The first one is “The Inner World of Trauma” by Jungian analyst Dr. David Kalsched. It consists of the dreams of those who have suffered trauma and includes an overview of Jung’s beliefs regarding trauma, contrasting them with Freud’s.

A recent follow-up book by the same author is “Trauma and the Soul” which further explores trauma and its treatment.

If you read these books and perhaps felt attracted to the Jungian approach overall, you might like to explore finding an analyst in your area.

If so, you could try the “Jung Referral Service” which can probably help to put you in touch with one.

The service is free and confidential and can be accessed through the Referral Service Co-ordinator, Dr. Maurice Krasnow at 1 646 522 6922 or by e-mailing [email protected]

In either case, a reply will be received within 24 hours and a personal telephone call with a trained analyst will be arranged to discuss your situation, location, preferences, financial considerations etc., and a referral can be scheduled within a week.

Although based in New York, referrals to analysts anywhere in Canada, the United States and other countries can be arranged.

For more information and details about the Referral Service, you can visit the website of the New York Association for Analytical Psychology at Jungian Therapy by New York Jungian Analyst, Therapist

Regarding your recurring dream, you don’t mention if you’ve in some way actively continued to find out more during the last three years (when the dream began) about the older unresolved memories by using various methods.

If you have been and they haven’t worked, it’s not impossible that the dream is a kind of self-protective one and is in effect saying something like “It’s best if you don’t keep pursuing this issue in the current circumstances” (wake up very frightened just as the man is about to reply).

If you think over this way of looking at your dream and it seems to make some sense, then the problem is that it would take a while to really confirm the interpretation.

That’s because the dream would likely stop if you’d hit upon the correct interpretation, but because it apparently appears only infrequently, it would take a fair length of time to see if it came back or not.

The other possibility is that another dream would appear to somehow support the interpretation but it could be hard to decipher such a dream and positively link it up in this way with the recurring dream.

Overall though, if you’re getting along pretty well in day-to-day life, it might be safer to just let the issue drop for a while if you’ve been continuing to try to find out what happened.

Of course, if the unresolved memories haven’t been on you mind during this time, another interpretation would be needed.

Anyway, I hope that these ideas can be helpful in some way.

Please feel free to ask any questions you might want to about this particular way of looking at your upsetting recurring dream.