It almost seems like my dreams have replaced my former life before this pandemic. I dream all the time now. Here is a dream from a few nights ago and last night that has me thinking about healing past wounds. I’ll explain as I go along. What’s interesting is that I dream about real people I have known throughout my life.
Here’s the dream from a few nights ago.
I’m in a room with a desk area lining the wall, kind of like what you’d see in an office. There is seating area with a couch and coffee table nearby. I’m seated on the couch. A past lover, Dan*, sits at the desk area that has a computer and he is learning how to edit videos, a teacher comes to him and guides him through the software.
On the couch, I’m looking through a pile of CDs. Someone I had a crush on, Steve*, is sitting in the area. There’s a small TV and I turn it on and start watching a vintage like home movie that Steve’s mom is in and she’s surrounded by younger women throughout it.
None of this dream makes any sense of why I would dream it, but there it is in my subconscious.
Last night’s dream was definitely more striking and has me in a quandary today, let me know what you think.
I am away from home at some kind of conference. The guy who first broke my heart in my younger years, Greg*, is there. At first I’m very shy and think, I really don’t want to interact with him at all. After all its been years, decades and I’m done with this chapter. It’s too late, and as I’ve turned my back to him, he comes behind me and grabs me by my ankles, lifting me off the ground. It’s his way of greeting me and expressing he’s happy to see me. We’re now hanging out together and he starts to kiss me. Nothing passionate, very small little pecks. It’s made me a nervous and wondering what’s going on. Then he asks, can we do more stuff? As in, he wants to make out more beyond kissing. I said sure, I was all for it. He continues kissing and being very affectionate. We never went beyond the kissing in the dream. At one point, we’re sitting and he’s behind me with his arms wrapped around me. It felt good in the dream to have him holding me. I thought in the dream, this is good, it makes sense. We should be a couple, this is who I will be with. Then a group of us got in a van and it appeared to be a shuttle stopping at various stops. We drove by a large massive university like building, like a library of some sort. Greg told the van to stop and he got off the van and just said bye to me like nothing happened. No words about keeping in touch or anything, he just went off.
Somewhere in this dream, I can’t remember if was before or after the Greg sequence, I was in a church. In the church, I was going through the side hallways along the chapel area, it was very ornate and reminded me of an old Catholic Church. I found my way into the chapel area, which was inside. Suddenly the chapel area turned into an outside stadium seated area with a tent above the seats. There was an elder man, *Mr. Smith, who was a friend of my family’s in real life that had passed away about five years ago, asked me to buy him Starbucks. I got him the Starbucks and now had to hand it to him. In order to do this, I had to walk up the levels of various people in the stands to get to him. I passed by this family I had grown up with in my parent’s church. Their family had three sons but in this dream, they had over ten sons, and they all looked alike and filled up about three to four rows of the seating area. It kind of freaked me out that there were so many of them. In the dream I kept thinking, they only had like three sons right? Maybe it was four, it wasn’t this many. I just about got there and that is all I remember.
Frequent Dreaming
I’ve continued to write about my dreams because they’ve been so vivid and constant for the past eight months. Before then I would have a dream maybe a couple times a month. Now it just feels like a ritual when I go to sleep, I wake with some bizarre dream. Its caused me to wonder if dreams are trying to replace the activity and interaction I would have with others before Covid. It’s interesting to posit that my brain is being impacted by pandemic shutdown subconsciously, it’s trying to create the hustle and bustle that I usually have going on.
On an emotional note, this recent dream felt healing and comforting. It was about that person in life from who teaches you about heartbreak. Truthfully, this one really did break me as a teenager and it was painful and hard to talk about and I still to this day do not discuss it with many people. Perhaps it was a heartache I never healed fully from and it came to the surface. If anything, I found comfort and it felt like a dream of closure to me. Albeit he left unceremoniously at the end, it was the affection and desire from him that was healing.
Or it could mean, I really need a boyfriend.
*Names have been changed for privacy.
Real funny. This article makes me wonder.