Thread: Reoccuring Nightmare that is confusing for me.

Have you talked to your doctor about these dreams you are having?

Originally Posted by XCryBabyx

Hi all, I hope that someone will be able to help me understand and interpret this dream that I have every single night and have for maybe around two months if not more. My memory of it is foggy even after I just wake up but I'll try to give as much detail as possible. To begin with I think I should mention, I have Borderline personality disorder, depression and CPTSD so that may effect my dreams I'm not sure?? Firstly I am not scared as such in these nightmares, I feel anxious mostly. The dream doen't really have a beginning as such, it throws me into the deep end right away. I have to collect something sometimes it is a gem or a book or even those small bean bags you kick around, every time I have that dream the object I need to collect changes but the rest of it remains the same. If I don't collect these things that I am being forced to collect I will be murdered by a woman with black hair. She is the same in every dream but I have no clue who she is, I have never seen or met her before. She is just intent on killing me and usually it's pretty violent, sometimes I get devoured alive by bugs, sometimes I get dismembered, the way I die sometimes remains the same through out the dreams but it changes every now and then. She always emphasizes that I didn't do what I was told to do and so I have to be killed. When I am able to wake myself up out of the dream I am very confused and I start to see things from my dream in reality and wake up finding myself trying to look for what ever I was supposed to find in the dream, obviously never finding it. Usually when I wake up is see this sort of constellation like structure this this black mist stuff trying to consume me that I physically fight off when I wake even though it's not actually there. I sometimes scream in my sleep because of it or wake up crying even though I'm not afraid. I'm not scared of dying or being murdered it's more the the anxiety of not being able to find the thing I'm supposed to find. The settlings of my dreams always occur in one of two places, my actual bedroom or in a big green field. There's never been anything else. I am hoping that someone will have some insight as to what this dream is about and why I have been dreaming it for as long as I have every night. Thank you so much

The woman with the black hair is your Shadow. She is You. Go look up "Carl Jung dream analysis" and "shadow work".

I have dreams like this too. Always a woman with long dark hair (maybe because I have dark hair?). In my dreams she is also evil. My evil twin.

She needs to be integrated into you. She needs to be accepted and loved unconditionally. She is all of the things that you have inside of you that you control, repress, are unaware of, do not love about yourself, or deny. Good and bad things, both.

Example: She could be very emotionally reactive, yet you may be quite cool-headed. Inside, though, you know there's this part of you that wants to hurt anyone that hurts you (pulling from my own dreams here, by the way..) - even if you never act on these feelings. So... she presents as a woman who murders, kills, hurts... you, even. You most of all. She is your ability to self-sabotage.

The key to dealing with a dream figure like this is to listen to her. She wants you to be aware of some deeper feelings going on inside. Maybe a part of you is hurting, but you're not really recognizing that, or acknowledging just how hurt you can be sometimes. Maybe a part of you is very angry at someone/something. Whatever it is, love her, accept her, and above all - listen to her. Validate her (your) emotions.

You can use lucidity to help you do this. When lucid, simply talk to your dream characters. Ask them what they represent, or if they have a message for you, talk to them. Flow love / give hugs to this character. If she doesn't appear when you're lucid, you can try to summon her.

Good luck. And please, as Humble said, make sure you keep your therapist in the loop, as this kind of thing is not very mainstream. It is a form of therapy, in my opinion. However, with diagnosed disorders such as you have, you don't want to risk something going wrong or getting worse as result of the lucid dreaming practice (in my opinion this would be rare, but always better to be safe ).

Good luck!!

You may want to bring up with your doctor about sleep disorders such as dream Nightmare Disorder and Dream Anxiety. I also suggest keeping a dream journal of any unusual sleeping patterns that you may experience and share those with your doctor(s). And yes lucid dreaming although it will not be easy.

I also agree with HumbleDreamer in that you should consult with your therapists on this, given the conditions you mentioned.

MoonageDaydream's points are also really worth thinking about. My own thoughts are somewhat in-line with hers; the other female character could indeed represent some aspect of yourself that hasn't been integrated yet. Dream interpretation is really quite complex even when you do know someone personally, so I would suggest you try to think critically by yourself about the dream, make notes about it but also don't go off in chains of association about what something could mean, you'd be there all day then. I don't think there's much of a risk of obsessing about it by doing this, since it might actually bring you a bit of peace to organise some notes about the dream. Definitely trust yourself too and don't take everything others (myself included) say as being the only way of looking at it, you will receive lots of different perspectives on such a complex dream and subject.

A question, is this character the one that is demanding/forcing you to find and collect the item? Or is it that she is just the agent of punishment in case of failure?

It's worth noting that death in dreams is very often associated with change or transformation, sometimes of yourself or part of yourself. You may have heard of this theme in popular culture before. As you are not particularly frightened by the expectation or experience of death from the dream, my thought is that the anxiety surrounding the activity of finding and collecting an item in the dream may be related to some aspect of your CPTSD, but I can only make guesses without knowing more anyway.

My symbolic interpretation is that you may have lost something about yourself but you don't know what it is or what it looks like... And yet some part of you (this female black-haired character) does know exactly what it is and feels it's so important, that your ego (i.e. thinking Self) is secondary to the goal of retrieving the lost thing (but perhaps it's not lost at all and it's simply a matter of wrong place/context). And on the other hand, sometimes more basic or primal parts of Self also won't be able to reason things out like we do; maybe what was lost is simply lost, actively looking for it may not bring it back. If this were(is?) a dream where you are lucid, I would be suggesting asking questions about this, getting the dream character to think about it too, "why are we looking for this?", "where did we last see it?", "why do you need to punish me? (maybe it can't be found)" and so on; critical questions that assess the importance of the symbolic object and what it represents to some part of you.

A metaphor for something lost and impossible to retrieve could be a pet that runs away and becomes lost; looking for it will be difficult or impossible because the world is huge and animals are at home in the wilderness, but sometimes these pets do return even when we aren't looking for them anymore and of course sometimes they never return. The same could potentially be true for a trait of a person's personality. Just the same, accepting loss of a part of ourselves is complex and takes a long time, whether it returns to us one day or not.

Originally Posted by XCryBabyx

She is just intent on killing me and usually it's pretty violent, sometimes I get devoured alive by bugs, sometimes I get dismembered, the way I die sometimes remains the same through out the dreams but it changes every now and then. She always emphasizes that I didn't do what I was told to do and so I have to be killed.

Finally, mostly as food for thought, I also think it's worth noting that from your wording there's an implied notion that this dream character expects you to fail. If this was some story-like trial of courage or will, the very act of challenging her could be the very answer she wants from you and the missing object would just be a plot device with no actual importance of its own. As I know so well myself, anxiety can be crippling and lead us to inaction, it can make us very passive. Sometimes things seem meaner and harder than they actually are because of it and it can feel like it takes twice as much courage and willpower to do something about it.

Hi Crybaby! I agree with the analysis of MoonageDaydream and DarkestDarkness. About talking with a therapist, I think the dream itself is nothing out of the ordinary, but you seem to have longer and more vivid hypnopompic (leading out of sleep) hallucinations than general. Perhaps this is your normal. I, myself, had vivid hypnagogic (leading to sleep) hallucinations as a kid but it went away as I grew up. As a kid also, I could wake up in something like a frenzy, feeling something was intensely wrong for a while. These types of events I think are not so ordinary for others I think and for myself, they did stop, but before you are worried, that's the name for it, probably: hypnopompic hallucinations. Kind of like the dream not being entirely gone as you wake up.

I'm just going around suggesting visualization to everyone right now so I'll do the same here, haha. If you connect with the comments you received or find your own meaning in this recurring nightmare, I suggest you daydream and recall the dream. As you revisit the dream, you can, for example, if MoonageDaydream's interpretation spoke to you, greet the dark-haired lady as your Shadow. "Hello, my Shadow." Here it's not only about calling her Shadow but really feeling the meaning of it. In this scenario you are recognizing that she is the part of you that you push out. You can see how doing this naturally changes your daydream. And then you can replay the daydream, adjusting how you react, until you find a resolution that is meaningful to you. If you connect with Darkestdarkness' answer too, you may want to succeed at finding the thing in your daydream. This will work best if you know what is a meaningful thing for you to find. As Darkestdarkness mentioned, it might be that you find the most catharsis by confronting the dark-haired lady, perhaps she holds the significant thing you are looking for, and perhaps following what Moonagedaydream said, you can retrieve that thing by welcoming the dark-haired lady into your being and share it together. Going through your daydream a few times, and perhaps connecting it to other significant memories from other dreams and real life might help change the course of the dream the next time you have it by strengthening other association pathways (learning).

In any case, good luck!