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I’ve been having a spate of mornings recently where I wake up and remember distressing dreams. In the past, I have gone long periods of time not remembering my dreams, leaving me to wonder if I was dreaming at all.
In my very quick google research, I found an article on Psychology Today that seems to indicate that there is a small group of people who don’t dream. However, I found the paragraph with that statement to not be very clear. It mentions that this group reports not remembering having dreams. This is not the same as not having dreams. And in a French study reported on in Discovery Magazine, researchers show that even when subjects reported not having had dreams, their bodies showed physical signs that they had dreamed.
For myself, I had been having a very poor sleep regimen, where I slept only a few hours each night. This is, as I have documented, the result of very poor sleep hygiene. Once I put away my phone and once I started winding down an hour before bed without any glowing blue screens or electronics, I started falling asleep earlier.
I have also recently been allowing myself to sleep in later as well. I had been somewhat cheating on my sleep regimen by grabbing my phone if I woke up early. I thought, well, my body is naturally waking up earlier, so it wasn’t bad if I just hopped on my phone. But, as with all of the crazy things my body has been starting to do recently, I realized that these early mornings were most likely the result of perimenopausal hormone fluctuations.
So, I said, no, you will not hop on your phone when you wake up super early. Instead, I removed some bed covers, made sure my room was cool and relaxing, and closed up my blackout curtains so that no light was sneaking in too early.
And, as a result, I have been sleeping in later. And that seems to have led me to waking up at a different point in my sleep cycle, and I have started to remember some vivid dreams. Three times this week, I have remembered stressful dreams that have seemed so real. One dream involved one of my teeth falling out, apparently a very common dream trope, and one involved the surprising presentation of a dangerous scorpion to me. It was obvious to me that I was somehow internalizing some stress and anxiety, maybe even from my fluctuating hormones. There are so many sites that will give you dream interpretations. Some are sedate and discuss how our minds process our daily emotions through dreams, and others go into the spiritual and metaphysical meanings of dream symbols.
For me, these fearful dream images have made me look back at recent thoughts to see why I would be dreaming these things. I do remember working hard on my next book’s outline, and I had determined that my character was a Scorpio. She was extremely intense, moody, and intuitive. I am pretty sure that the imagery that I had in my head over these intense outlining sessions bled into my dreaming thoughts. And the same goes for my teeth. I have been internalizing recent stresses, and I can definitely feel my jaw clenching; it seems only natural that I would dream about that stress manifesting as a tooth falling loose.
It’s very tempting to think about what these dreams may foretell or portend, but for me, the biggest insight is determining what these dreams, images, and symbols can tell me about what has already happened in my life. It helps me to put my stresses into perspective (hey, it least things aren’t as bad as a tooth falling right out of my head or a live scorpion trying to sting me to death) and to maybe even grab some useful images for my next stories.
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