My nightmares

I have dreams. Some of them pleasant, some of them strange or weird, most of them "lucid" in that I know I am dreaming and can affect the course of the dream. And some of them, inevitably, nightmares. The nightmares, certainly for several years now, have all tended towards a single theme based around fear.

The fear that comes through in these dreams, these nightmares, is always the same. What is happening in the dreams is abandonment, and this is what in the dreams I fear the most (I'll talk a bit about relevance to real-life later).

There tends to be a second theme of having to move and either not having anywhere to move to, or else having some reason why I can't move quickly enough (f'rex, having too much baggage that needs to be moved with me), but that's less frequent.

In the nightmares I have, there will be a person or small group of people on whom I rely, and whom I trust deeply. They may be real-life people, like my parents, or a friend (or group of friends) I know in r/l. They may be fictitious people that my dream has invented either to be friends or to be some supposedly dependable organisation. Either way, in the dream they are people to whom I know that I can turn when the going gets tough.

Then, of course, the going does get tough and, for one reason or another, the reliable, dependable, trusted people turn around and say to me "Uh-uh, not this time!" I think some of the most horrible nightmares I have are where the reason the going got tough is because I had some kind of falling out with these trusted people - some kind of emotional outburst from me and then it's revealed that they never really liked me, or set off because they've suddenly overstepped a boundary and hurt me emotionally in that way. And then I need to deal with a situation, one that often involves some kind of physical threat (a common example in my dreams seems to be a threat of homelessness) and the people that once I trusted to have my back suddenly aren't there or aren't willing to help. They abandon me to flounder in this situation by myself. In one recent dream (and this is another feature that sometimes resurfaces) it was a "homelessness" situation and the friends I had relied upon refused to help but instead helped me to pack up my belongings ready for me to be chucked out of my home!

In real-life, I am unemployed which means I actually am dependent upon others. I have some pretty tough challenges to make ends meet each month and I am sure that this anxiety feeds into those dreams. I don't have very many friends of the type in this dream, and none of them would turn me down if I needed their help, I am sure! But I think one of the scariest things about these dreams is that they are so close to real life in this sense of being on the edge of disaster and having to depend upon others to be a safety net. In the dream, of course, just as I start to fall, the safety net is taken away. The fact that it's people rather than things (that is, the dreams aren't dreams of falling and seeing a safety net disappear; they're dreams of having people fail to catch me) perhaps says something about what I fear most. But is it that I trust things and not people, or is it that I have no trust of things to save me so that I fear my trust in people may sometimes be misplaced? Personally, I'm not sure what my deep underlying emotional position is on those questions. I do know that my temperament is slanted towards relying on my own efforts rather than others' because of having been let down in that past, so maybe that is where these dreams originate. I think also there's a strong link with my history of depression. That is a disease that can make me feel very isolated indeed.

I hate having these nightmares, because they challenge and strike at the deepest beliefs I have about safety and security, especially around other people. My own mind is, it seems, my most effective torturer at times.