I usually don't remember what I've dreamed
Probably this is something a lot of people recognize, not remembering what they've been dreaming about. Most of the time I wake up, feeling like crap after a shitty night filled with weird dreams. This is what happens most nights for a few months. I'm kind of used to it by now, lol.
Often I can't point my finger to the weirdness of my dreams when I wake up feeling wrecked. I have noticed that there's an increase in weird dreams at night whenever I feel it's too cold to sleep with the window open.
The nights that I open the window, I wake up far more rested and also have less strange dreams during the night. Or I just can't remember the dreams at all.
When I remember, there always seems to be a message
I notice that the times when I do remember the dreams, they are either very pleasant and make me happy, or they are so weird or scary that they freaked me out and that's why I can't let go of them, and remember exactly what happened. There's actually no in between, like a normal happy dream that's not giving me the extreme feeling of joy or the opposite: the nightmares that freak me out even hours after I woke up. I often wonder why that is?
Sometimes though, I wake up because I need to pee and felt that I have unfinished business in my dreams, so I decide to go back to sleep to try to "finish the dream" to get some answers. Last week I had one of these mornings where that happened. I think the reason this dream came forward out of curiosity and kept me busy even in my subconsciousness. It was not a special topic, but I had been asking out loud every day for a few weeks what's happening at the neighbor's place and for some reason, I had the weirdest dream about this (this "answer" can not be true lol). But I realized that I was so curious that my subconsciousness was also trying to find answers lol.
For a long time, nights were used to heal from the trauma
I do enjoy my dreams sometimes though because for years I never remembered any of my dreams until a phase where I had nothing other than nightmares.
Night after night, I felt unsafe and scared and woke up feeling restless and definitely not rested in the morning. My boyfriend often woke me up gently to take me out of the bad dream so that I could "try again" and sleep through the night hopefully without being in a constant state of fear.
When I woke up I often didn't know where I was and felt disoriented plus my heart was racing as if I'd been running a marathon. I also remember that I didn't want to talk it out, I preferred to forget whatever I saw during the night. Things belonging to the past, and hoping to never occur again.
I kept thinking that these nightmares were horrible, but also for a good cause as occurred to help me process and eventually heal from traumas. I can't say that they helped me heal from all of them, but I can say that they definitely made me get through the sharp edges that were blocking me from moving forward. There were years that I could not let go of these things, and constantly felt blocked, these days are over. Thankfully!
I would love to learn about lucid dreaming
In the period of my life that my boyfriend was waking me up to let me snap out of the nightmares, he also tried talking to me and comforting me before trying that. He told me that he'd try to talk positive things to me and tell me it was just a nightmare and not real in the hope that I would slowly feel safe again. At that time, he read a lot about lucid dreaming and he tried to explain some stuff to me, which I wasn't interested in at the time, btw.
But now those nightmares aren't something happening frequently anymore, I got reminded (by this question of the week) to read a bit about lucid dreaming. I can't say if it's for me yet, but I can at least try to find out, right? It's like learning how to write your own book while dreaming. I think it could be very interesting!
Messages from loved ones
I have spoken about this before in another question of the week. I sometimes feel deeply connected to loved ones in dreams, these are those moments that I don't want to wake up because I feel the love and warmth, and while dreaming KNOW that these dreams are happening to leave me a message. I have no doubt that there's something I need to see and don't want to wake up before I figured it out. I also remember these vividly and without any loss of information.
I truly believe we can learn a lot from and in our dreams, it's an interesting topic which probably has a life-time full of information to learn from, but probably defo worth my time.
Maybe, to be continued :)