Dreams

I am not a person obsessed by dreams and dream interpretation, but I do find it interesting to think about dreams - why we have them, when we have them, what they might reflect. I am lucky because most of my life I have slept hard and well. This meant that I rarely remembered my dreams.  On the rare occasion I would remember a dream when I awakened, they were always good and happy, or with no emotions, and almost never scary. 


However, something changed over the past year or so and now I wake up remembering dreams quite a lot. And these dreams are so vivid. They are intense, elaborate, and very detailed. So much happens that it blows my mind a little when I wake up hanging on to the last fading threads of that world. These dreams are epic. 

Of course I can't recall them now. I don't write them down and even though I remember them during those first waking moments, or sometimes even later into the day or week, they do eventually fade away completely. As I write this now, trying to communicate the epic intensity of these dreams, I do wish I had been writing them down. It just seems like too much work...but perhaps I will try.


I am writing about this right now because its morning and I am still remembering the vivid dream I had last night and some of the dream from the night before. I don't recall remembering dreams like this for many weeks, but now suddenly this week has been intense. Last night I had a very long, complex dream with many things happening around a house, with a lot of people and activities - I can only recall faint jumbled threads now - not enough to write about it...but I do recall the end of the dream right before I woke up. I was outside in back of the house looking into an area with a number of large rocks and I was rushed (yes, it rushed out and attacked me) by a copperhead snake that bit me on the hand. I stared in disbelief and my hand started to swell up. I went inside to wake up my sleeping husband to take me to the emergency room. It wasn't really scary - it was more shocking. It was unexpected and I was staring at my hand thinking "I've just been bit by a very poisonous snake and I must get help." I knew the snake was a copperhead, yet it had the coloring of a coral snake.


Curious about this I just looked up dream interpretations and read that if you dream of a snake biting you it can represent hidden fears and worries that are threatening you. If you want to look at it from a more positive angle, it is said to represent self-renewal, healing, transformation, knowledge and wisdom. I am pondering where that dream came from.

More interesting to me is the dream I had the night before. I really can't recall much of anything any more except that at the end of the dream I was crying very intensely out of sorrow and I woke up with tears crying. I have never had that happen in my life! Have you? In the dream I was with someone and we were being chased. There was a lot of intense drama. It was not scary, but it was very, very sad. From what I can recall it was like I was in the past, during the civil rights era. We were being pursued and threatened. I was with a black man - an old friend from high school who I haven't seen since graduation, but who I recently reconnected with. He and I were hiding from people and I was crying a lot - again not because we were afraid of being captured, but because the whole world was such a sad, sorrowful place. Waking up crying was so intense. What was that all about?


Back to the dream interpretations. What I read is: "To dream that you are crying, signifies a release of negative emotions that is more likely caused by some waking situation rather than the events of the dream itself. Your dream is a way to regain some emotional balance and to safely let out your fears and frustrations...To wake up crying, represents some suppressed hurt or previous trauma that is coming up to the surface. You can no longer suppress these emotions. They need to be dealt with head on."


Sounds like someone has some issues to work out...